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Always great to see new ways to integrate with Spotify. I think that if you're paying for a Spotify Premium subscription you should be able to stream music wher

Always great to see new ways to integrate with Spotify. I think that if you're paying for a Spotify Premium subscription you should be able to stream music wherever you want! However Spotify doesn't agree. If this is based on librespot its using stuff Spotify doesn't support and could easily shut down for unauthorized clients any time. Their supported paths are iOS and Android SDKs for mobile, and the Web Playback SDK for desktop [1]. I've been using the web SDK in anger to build a jukebox app [2] and its only so-so. First, you're under the confines of a web browser which has some pretty big tradeoffs over the experience and system integrations you can build. Next, song playback works as advertised but there are many things you can't do like introspect the queue or prevent Spotify Radio from kicking in. The latter is downright hostile to controlling exactly what songs you hear. I assume that always going into auto-recommendation mode is intentional to juice playback stats. Kudos to spotifyd for offering total control over how and where you stream music you're paying for. 1. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk... 2. https://www.getjukelab.com/ https://www.getjukelab.com/

nomel 4y ago
> However Spotify doesn't agree. My naive assumption is that Spotify would love to, but the record labels don't agree.
- nzoschke 4y ago
  Could be. When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time. The biggest change I personally suffered from is when they pulled out of their integration with Djay, a DJ app. This integration was amazing for bedroom DJs like myself, being able to use Spotify to organize DJ music and DJ directly from it. Then they sunset the entire integration. Now Djay and even bigger apps like Pioneer Rekordbox integrate with Tidal... Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own?
  - super256 4y ago
    > Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own? Me, being a naive speculator: Maybe it has something to do with the time. The original contracts between spotify + labels were probably written 15 years ago. Over time they might have changed numbers like how big spotify's cut is, but never revised the rest of the blueprint contracts. So, my bet is laziness / not caring enough.
    - 0x457 4y ago
      I used to work in music and had to deal with requirements forced on us by labels and such. Those contracts aren't "written 15 years ago and barely revisited" music industry lawyers wouldn't leave a stone unturned of turning it will benefit their client. Labels do prefer Tidal because it's a service made by the music industry. However, Spotify is lacking features it used to have because they are product driven and such integrations are not on product people's radar (like you said - lazy and don't care).
  - humanistbot 4y ago
    > Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own? Yes, labels and artists get a bigger cut of the subscription cost from Tidal. And before the buy-out by Square last year, Tidal's parent company was majority-owned by Jay-Z and had lots of buy-in from music industry insiders.
  - SleekoNiko 4y ago
    > When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time. This is somewhat tangential, but I feel like this happens often, as internal power and culture shifts away from being developer-driven to consumer- or manager-driven. This doesn't happen for every company, thankfully.
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      > This doesn't happen for every company, thankfully. It happened to Twitter didn't it?
- ra 4y ago
  Qobuz and Tidal both have developer friendly APIs. You can absolutely build your own client. Roon will index either or both of them with your local mp3 library. It decorates with third-party metadata services, and will stream hi-res to almost any hardware device you can throw at it.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Are there any open clients? I'm looking for a good music service that plays on my freebsd desktop ideally without using the browser. Right now I use sootify-qt using spotifyd but it's a bit hit and miss.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    > Qobuz and Tidal both have developer friendly APIs. Last time I looked, Tidal didn't offer a public API. They were 100% closed and developer unfriendly. You had to "borrow" their client ID for use with reverse engineered clients. Has this changed? If so can you link to the docs please?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- neura 4y ago
  Your assumption is correct. The record labels are their business partners. Spotify does not dictate the terms while the record labels hold all the popular content.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  That is who they always blame, but it is just a ploy. Like netflix, the dominant player always wants control Remember when Netflix first started they had amazing API's and all kinds of cool things where built off them, then one day they got big enough and shut them all down, of course they claim it was the "evil industry" that made them do it, but I simply do not believe them, nor do I believe spotify. This pattern has been repeated over and over since the dawn of the internet, Early Platform is open, and dev focused to bring people in, then over time they wall off the garden to only their apps... Google, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and countless others all follow this pattern.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I guarantee you any company doing what Spotify does would love to cut out the middleman. The problem is that middleman owns near-everything your users want. They hold all the cards, they can just say "hey, either you do X or you don't get our music library" and now your customers don't have ~95% music library they wanted. I'd wager Spotify's reluctance to "just let you listen to fucking music" might be related to that, if it was just API you could integrate with any player you could make indie-only Spotify equivalent that just... uses Spotify API to play whatever is not on it.
dahdum 4y ago
> I assume that always going into auto-recommendation mode is intentional to juice playback stats. That’s one of my favorite features, sometimes I’m too distracted driving or doing something else to manage Spotify, but that doesn’t mean I want the background music to stop entirely.
- nzoschke 4y ago
  Yes it's a killer platform and Spotify app feature. But for a developer building a custom listening experience it needs to be completely optional. Right now you literally can't build an experience that plays just one song and stops after because "radio" automatically kicks in. You need to do crazy hacks to pause the current song before it ends or enqueue a silent track and intercept that, if you don't want to occasionally hear a small bit of an unwanted radio song before correcting.
- Jataman606 4y ago
  That’s one of my least favorite features, sometimes I’m too distracted driving or doing something else to manage Spotify and i want my albums to restart from beginning, but then it goes to some radio i don't want. And no, clicking "repeat playlist" button doesn't work because they flip it off randomly.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
Is your web app open source? Maybe this is just me, but I take an issue with projects that use GitHub's community features but don't publish their source code. Feels somewhat unfair.
- nzoschke 4y ago
  Currently not open source but I long have been thinking about open sourcing it. What's wrong with using GH community features? It's a side / passion project so no time or budget to build any support or community stuff. I considered GitHub, Reddit and Discord and all have pros/cons.
  - EMIRELADERO 4y ago
    Nothing technically wrong, but GitHub is primarily a code host, the "code place", if you will. So when people use it for issues/feedback its mostly because they have the supporting source on the side.
- airtonix 4y ago
bmicraft 4y ago
> If this is based on librespot It's built on RSpotify, which describes itself as: > RSpotify is a wrapper for the Spotify Web API, inspired by spotipy. It includes support for all the authorization flows, and helper functions for all endpoints.
- trynewideas 4y ago
  librespot is a dependency: https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/db25d12d7211bea9cd6a9b8ac51667771cc2cff9/Cargo.lock#L1404-L1542 https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/db25d12d7211bea9cd..., https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/00f52f983ce0d2162ea2fef677e2c9eee7c8f6ef/src/setup.rs#L9-L19 https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/00f52f983ce0d2162e...
- nzoschke 4y ago
  According to spotifyd/Cargo.toml is uses both librespot and rspotify. Librespot is the a level playback client that reverse engineered what the native Spotify desktop apps do to get, decode and play a music stream as a connected device. RSpotify is a high level client that uses the Spotify Web API which can control what is playing on any connected device. Neither of which should be confused with the Spotify Web Playback SDK which turns your browser into a connected device provided it supports the right DRM bits. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...
winternett 4y ago
Just one minor tweak of what plays next can totally rip off independent artists on the platform. We have reached an era where algorithms aren't transparent, so artists like me are bewildered that for all the promoting we do on our own music, we rarely get any views and listens unless we literally spend thousands of dollars on advertising to break the visibility barrier... For example, if I tweet a link to my own song (hosted on spotify) not only will Twitter potentially block people from seeing the link, their URL shortener may break the link to Spotify (Because the CEO doesn't want traffic leaving Twitter) and then even if the link goes to Spotify, they do a ton of things to siphon listeners that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays. The net result is that hours of promotion as an artist only generates a few leads that often get ushered away from your content... It happens in many other ways for creators, artists, and even businesses without anyone being able to know that it's happening. The future of being an independent entrepreneur is totally disrupted by social media as it slowly creates a stranglehold on the Internet. If we all don't start acknowledging this and calling out anti competitive practices and platform scams, we'll all be weeded out from being able to make our own living and we'll be forced to work for employers for minimum wages... The Future of the Internet looks grim from where I see it.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  This is a problem inherent with walled garden social media. Their garden, their rules. Instead of trying to police behavior we don't like in those walled gardens (which is mostly like trying to walk in quicksand) we should be supporting open protocols and systems that don't require a walled garden at all, like the internet used to be.
  - marcus_holmes 4y ago
    This. You can always host your own music on your own site. Of course then you need to deal with monetisation and how you actually get paid. But you have control! Sincerely, as Spotify (and the rest of the streaming services) are forced to make more and more user-hostile decisions to keep their revenue growth curve going up and to the right, it might make sense to jump ship early.
nigamanth 4y ago
At the end of the day, services such as Spotify want to make profits too. I guess we can't blame them for not getting carried away and displaying ads on their website. Greed is possibly the most common human emotion in the world.

nomel 4y ago

> However Spotify doesn't agree. My naive assumption is that Spotify would love to, but the record labels don't agree.

nzoschke 4y ago
Could be. When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time. The biggest change I personally suffered from is when they pulled out of their integration with Djay, a DJ app. This integration was amazing for bedroom DJs like myself, being able to use Spotify to organize DJ music and DJ directly from it. Then they sunset the entire integration. Now Djay and even bigger apps like Pioneer Rekordbox integrate with Tidal... Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own?
- super256 4y ago
  > Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own? Me, being a naive speculator: Maybe it has something to do with the time. The original contracts between spotify + labels were probably written 15 years ago. Over time they might have changed numbers like how big spotify's cut is, but never revised the rest of the blueprint contracts. So, my bet is laziness / not caring enough.
  - 0x457 4y ago
    I used to work in music and had to deal with requirements forced on us by labels and such. Those contracts aren't "written 15 years ago and barely revisited" music industry lawyers wouldn't leave a stone unturned of turning it will benefit their client. Labels do prefer Tidal because it's a service made by the music industry. However, Spotify is lacking features it used to have because they are product driven and such integrations are not on product people's radar (like you said - lazy and don't care).
- humanistbot 4y ago
  > Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own? Yes, labels and artists get a bigger cut of the subscription cost from Tidal. And before the buy-out by Square last year, Tidal's parent company was majority-owned by Jay-Z and had lots of buy-in from music industry insiders.
- SleekoNiko 4y ago
  > When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time. This is somewhat tangential, but I feel like this happens often, as internal power and culture shifts away from being developer-driven to consumer- or manager-driven. This doesn't happen for every company, thankfully.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    > This doesn't happen for every company, thankfully. It happened to Twitter didn't it?
ra 4y ago
Qobuz and Tidal both have developer friendly APIs. You can absolutely build your own client. Roon will index either or both of them with your local mp3 library. It decorates with third-party metadata services, and will stream hi-res to almost any hardware device you can throw at it.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Are there any open clients? I'm looking for a good music service that plays on my freebsd desktop ideally without using the browser. Right now I use sootify-qt using spotifyd but it's a bit hit and miss.
- nsteel 4y ago
  > Qobuz and Tidal both have developer friendly APIs. Last time I looked, Tidal didn't offer a public API. They were 100% closed and developer unfriendly. You had to "borrow" their client ID for use with reverse engineered clients. Has this changed? If so can you link to the docs please?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
neura 4y ago
Your assumption is correct. The record labels are their business partners. Spotify does not dictate the terms while the record labels hold all the popular content.
phpisthebest 4y ago
That is who they always blame, but it is just a ploy. Like netflix, the dominant player always wants control Remember when Netflix first started they had amazing API's and all kinds of cool things where built off them, then one day they got big enough and shut them all down, of course they claim it was the "evil industry" that made them do it, but I simply do not believe them, nor do I believe spotify. This pattern has been repeated over and over since the dawn of the internet, Early Platform is open, and dev focused to bring people in, then over time they wall off the garden to only their apps... Google, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and countless others all follow this pattern.
ilyt 4y ago
I guarantee you any company doing what Spotify does would love to cut out the middleman. The problem is that middleman owns near-everything your users want. They hold all the cards, they can just say "hey, either you do X or you don't get our music library" and now your customers don't have ~95% music library they wanted. I'd wager Spotify's reluctance to "just let you listen to fucking music" might be related to that, if it was just API you could integrate with any player you could make indie-only Spotify equivalent that just... uses Spotify API to play whatever is not on it.

dahdum 4y ago

> I assume that always going into auto-recommendation mode is intentional to juice playback stats. That’s one of my favorite features, sometimes I’m too distracted driving or doing something else to manage Spotify, but that doesn’t mean I want the background music to stop entirely.

nzoschke 4y ago
Yes it's a killer platform and Spotify app feature. But for a developer building a custom listening experience it needs to be completely optional. Right now you literally can't build an experience that plays just one song and stops after because "radio" automatically kicks in. You need to do crazy hacks to pause the current song before it ends or enqueue a silent track and intercept that, if you don't want to occasionally hear a small bit of an unwanted radio song before correcting.
Jataman606 4y ago
That’s one of my least favorite features, sometimes I’m too distracted driving or doing something else to manage Spotify and i want my albums to restart from beginning, but then it goes to some radio i don't want. And no, clicking "repeat playlist" button doesn't work because they flip it off randomly.

EMIRELADERO 4y ago

Is your web app open source? Maybe this is just me, but I take an issue with projects that use GitHub's community features but don't publish their source code. Feels somewhat unfair.

nzoschke 4y ago
Currently not open source but I long have been thinking about open sourcing it. What's wrong with using GH community features? It's a side / passion project so no time or budget to build any support or community stuff. I considered GitHub, Reddit and Discord and all have pros/cons.
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  Nothing technically wrong, but GitHub is primarily a code host, the "code place", if you will. So when people use it for issues/feedback its mostly because they have the supporting source on the side.
airtonix 4y ago

bmicraft 4y ago

> If this is based on librespot It's built on RSpotify, which describes itself as: > RSpotify is a wrapper for the Spotify Web API, inspired by spotipy. It includes support for all the authorization flows, and helper functions for all endpoints.

trynewideas 4y ago
librespot is a dependency: https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/db25d12d7211bea9cd6a9b8ac51667771cc2cff9/Cargo.lock#L1404-L1542 https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/db25d12d7211bea9cd..., https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/00f52f983ce0d2162ea2fef677e2c9eee7c8f6ef/src/setup.rs#L9-L19 https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/blob/00f52f983ce0d2162e...
nzoschke 4y ago
According to spotifyd/Cargo.toml is uses both librespot and rspotify. Librespot is the a level playback client that reverse engineered what the native Spotify desktop apps do to get, decode and play a music stream as a connected device. RSpotify is a high level client that uses the Spotify Web API which can control what is playing on any connected device. Neither of which should be confused with the Spotify Web Playback SDK which turns your browser into a connected device provided it supports the right DRM bits. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...

winternett 4y ago

Just one minor tweak of what plays next can totally rip off independent artists on the platform. We have reached an era where algorithms aren't transparent, so artists like me are bewildered that for all the promoting we do on our own music, we rarely get any views and listens unless we literally spend thousands of dollars on advertising to break the visibility barrier... For example, if I tweet a link to my own song (hosted on spotify) not only will Twitter potentially block people from seeing the link, their URL shortener may break the link to Spotify (Because the CEO doesn't want traffic leaving Twitter) and then even if the link goes to Spotify, they do a ton of things to siphon listeners that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays. The net result is that hours of promotion as an artist only generates a few leads that often get ushered away from your content... It happens in many other ways for creators, artists, and even businesses without anyone being able to know that it's happening. The future of being an independent entrepreneur is totally disrupted by social media as it slowly creates a stranglehold on the Internet. If we all don't start acknowledging this and calling out anti competitive practices and platform scams, we'll all be weeded out from being able to make our own living and we'll be forced to work for employers for minimum wages... The Future of the Internet looks grim from where I see it.

idiotsecant 4y ago
This is a problem inherent with walled garden social media. Their garden, their rules. Instead of trying to police behavior we don't like in those walled gardens (which is mostly like trying to walk in quicksand) we should be supporting open protocols and systems that don't require a walled garden at all, like the internet used to be.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  This. You can always host your own music on your own site. Of course then you need to deal with monetisation and how you actually get paid. But you have control! Sincerely, as Spotify (and the rest of the streaming services) are forced to make more and more user-hostile decisions to keep their revenue growth curve going up and to the right, it might make sense to jump ship early.

nigamanth 4y ago

At the end of the day, services such as Spotify want to make profits too. I guess we can't blame them for not getting carried away and displaying ads on their website. Greed is possibly the most common human emotion in the world.