17 ms·

Spotify has shut down several API endpoints

293 points by leecoursey 2y ago

snvzz 2y ago
Remember: FLAC files don't lose API endpoints.
- wavemode 2y ago
  "Physical books don't run out of battery" type energy.
  - acidburnNSA 2y ago
    Flac files have most of the benefits of streaming, whereas physical books are a lot less like digital books. You can instantly purchase and download flac files, sync them across devices, play them over networks, duplicate them, hold thousands of them on your phone, etc.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      Also I can shrink my FLACs into 256kbps OPUS and store ~9 hours of audio in 1GB. I cannot (easily) shrink my physical books into microfilm and read them. The better comparison is PDF + OCR’d text VS Kindle.
      - GrantMoyer 2y ago
        An aside: for stereo audio, even 128kbps OPUS is probably overkill[1]. [1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings
        snvzz 2y ago
        OPUS is great for low-bandwidth situation. The best. But it is lossy, and thus not a good archival format. At some point, there'll be better lossy formats than OPUS, and then we'll need the lossless source again.
- toxican 2y ago
  They also don't only cost $12/mo for access to pretty much everything I'd ever want to listen to.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Is that $12/mo truly worth it? I mean, do you find 13+ new songs you genuinely enjoy every month? And would the alternative media be so expensive that you couldn’t build your library using that $12/mo, over a reasonable period of time? I know for me that it’s not worth it, I can buy 3-4 CDs for that $12, even less if I find some good deals, and I’ve had better luck finding new music at the Goodwill than I have with Spotify.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      > buy 3-4 CDs I'd wager that there's a good number of people that don't even own a CD player anymore. $12/month to have music to listen to, even if I don't have new tracks pushed on to me, seems like a reasonable deal to me to not have to deal with the hassle of hosting it on my own server and, what, ripping my CDs to mp3s? If a friend comes in and wants to hear something, Spotify is more likely to have it than my local mp3 collection.
      - badmintonbaseba 2y ago
        Owning your music files doesn't necessarily imply that you have to by them physically on CDs. Of course the music you are interested in might not be available in your preferred format or on your preferred streaming platform.
      - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
        Yes, and it’s a shame people have abandoned physical media. Who said you had to host it though? You can also simply keep them on your phone. 1GB of storage comes out to around 20 hours of 128kbps OPUS, which will sound identical to Spotify’s offerings, and takes all of a few minutes to rip the disk, have a program automatically tag the metadata, and convert every song to OPUS. It’s also more likely that your friend will find their music on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you should get YouTube Premium.
- flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
  FLAC also doesn't give you the information these google'd API's did. My bicycle won't run out of gas but that doesn't mean it's more useful/reliable than my car for a cross country road trip
  - snvzz 2y ago
    What if I told you, FLAC supports metadata? That way, you can have the information you need w/o being tracked.
    - flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
      I think my comment laid out the problem very clearly. You need a _source_ for the information, not a place to persist it. Do you have a solution for how to cheaply extract features from songs? If yes, I'd love to hear about it, but if not, your evangelism and impotent attempts to defend it are not productive to this conversation.
leecoursey 2y ago
Spotify announced they have shut down several API endpoints, effective immediately. They have grandfathered in existing apps that have extended mode Web API access.
leecoursey 2y ago
Unfortunately, this breaks a lot of custom python programs I was using to facilitate music discovery and to generate playlists for myself.
- Yajirobe 2y ago
  It doesn’t affect existing apps > Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.
  - danielkuntz 2y ago
    Doesn't affect existing apps with extended mode access, for which you have to apply and be approved. Gives you a higher ratelimit so you can ship to production. Plenty of people (me included) build small widgets for themselves without bothering to apply for extended.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    > These changes will impact the following Web API applications: - Existing apps that are still in development mode without a pending extension request - New apps that are registered on or after today's date Most people writing small scripts were probably using an API key with development mode.
    - leecoursey 2y ago
      > Most people writing small scripts were probably using an API key with development mode. Yep, me included. Since my apps were never meant as anything more than utilities for myself, I never applied for extended access. Nevertheless, I used these tools multiple times a day, especially for sorting and filtering playlists by audio features such as energy and valence. Now, apparently, they will never work again. I'm sure there are plenty of other hobbyists in the same boat.
      - nsteel 2y ago
        Even for those that want extended access, what's suppose to be a simple review process is absolutely broken. Their dev forum is full of people who have applied and been left waiting for months with no communication.
smashah 2y ago
Godspeed to all the OSS Adversarial Interoperability reverse engineers! APIs should be a digital human right.
- RockRobotRock 2y ago
  De-enshittify by any means necessary!
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Companies are going to continue to enshittify as long as customers refuse to leave them. There's no incentive not to. People who want to do stuff like making custom apps or scripts that use these APIs should instead be building their own music servers.
    - thejazzman 2y ago
      PlexAMP is awesome
    - sham1 2y ago
      And when one is building this kind of a music server, please support your favourite artists! Ideally, if they have a Bandcamp or something similar, where you can directly buy their tracks and albums from them, do that. Usually this means that you can get access to high-quality FLACs and whatnot, but it will also mean that more money will go directly to the artists (usually money going to the record label and whatnot is unavoidable even with this, but there will still be fewer people in the middle). And well, if that's not a thing, then at least try to buy the tracks from somewhere, so that they at least see some return on their efforts. Maybe physical CDs and the like. The point is just to be able to support your favourite artists!
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Your suggestions are fine, but if you really want to support your favorite musicians, you should attend their concerts and buy merchandise there. They personally get far more profit from ticket sales and merch sales than from selling music directly. And of course, the concert experience is something way beyond just listening to a track from Bandcamp or a CD.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Are any alternative APIs (non Spotify) available for the functionality being deprecated in this notice?
- danielkuntz 2y ago
  Not any good ones unfortunately! Great opportunity for someone to make one while other platforms are still scrapeable.
  - leoh 2y ago
    You don’t need to scrape other platforms. LLMs are already probably pretty darn good at this.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      Can LLMs analyze song features (danceability, instrumentalness, speechiness, tempo)?
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Audio analysis is one of the easiest problems that ML can deal with. The problem is, how can you use a pretrained LLM for discovering newly-released music? And how do you train future models without a source of new data?
        echoangle 2y ago
        > Audio analysis is one of the easiest problems that ML can deal with. Maybe, but that doesn’t tell me anything about LLMs. I’m not saying that it’s a particularly hard problem, I’m surprised that an LLM specifically would be good for this purpose.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        Yeah, there seems to be an unfortunate trend towards using "LLM" when people really mean "transformer."
RGamma 2y ago
> Kills API > Third party integrations continue to play an important role in the way users can experience the Spotify experience through third party apps. We evaluate the set up of our platform on an ongoing basis and remain committed to ensuring it provides the best possible opportunities for developers, artists, creators and listeners. Read that as: Hell yeah, we're gonna enshittify.
- Pesthuf 2y ago
  Has the same ring as "we value your privacy. That’s why we and our 739 partners want to track everything you do, link it to your real ID and sell it off to anyone willing to buy."
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    The New Jersey Transit app really wants me to enable location tracking for the app. It really opens up the settings app every time I buy or activate a ticket. I'm sure location tracking would really help me buy tickets and have the QR code scanned by a conductor.
dxxvi 2y ago
Long time ago, spotify allowed us to create, modify our playlists through end points. Now, it's impossible.
- tim-- 2y ago
  When did this stop being supported by Spotify? https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/create-playlist https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/reorder-or-replace-playlists-tracks https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/remove-tracks-playlist https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... I think you are talking about "Get Featured Playlists", which is more geared towards Spotify created playlists, which is under the 'Browse' tab in Spotify.
specproc 2y ago
This is very sad, and another nudge away from Spotify for me. I remember the API being a motivator for signing up, and I've hacked together a few toys with it over the years. Realistically now, the only benefit Spotify provides over my MP3 collection is that it's better organised.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Musicbrainz Picard + PlexAmp is a pretty good solution. Picard sets _all_ the metadata on the music and PlexAmp uses it to create playlists with the OpenAI API.
  - specproc 2y ago
    Nice, thanks for the rec. I'd seen beets as well which also looks good. Spotify is definitely the lowest hanging fruit for culling on my subscription list. The API was very much part of the value proposition. I don't believe it's even that good a deal for artists. I heard the mighty Snoop Dogg makes like USD 40K a year off it or something stupid like that.
    - bytefish 2y ago
      Snoop Dogg made USD 40k for one song, which also has multiple songwriters on it. There’s a good breakdown in [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ba0ggi/comment/ktzcbq4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ba0ggi/...
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        Key phrase from that research: > I'm not sure how much royalties you can expect when you're one of 17 credited songwriters on one song you don't even own which samples a song that also samples songs...I think $45k is pretty damned good.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      > I don't believe it's even that good a deal for artists. I heard the mighty Snoop Dogg makes like USD 40K a year off it or something stupid like that. What would be the non-stupid amount for Snoop Dogg to make off it?
ribadeo 2y ago
Spotify siphons yet more income artists should be getting into corporate coffers and Daniel Ek's bank account. No music lover should be using Spotify. They are notorious for driving the downward trend in streaming payments to artists. They are arguably worse than the worst of the old Music Industry we were taught to hate in "tech disruptor culture 1.0". Bandcamp revenue goes straight to artists, largely. I got 89 out of 99 dollars paid on a release of mine.
- leoh 2y ago
  Good to point out and I’m with you but… fwiw… I think the intersection of people that are upset about a free recommendation API being cancelled and people who want a music platform that pays artists fairly is essentially zero. So yeah
- blitzar 2y ago
  > arguably worse than the worst of the old <insert industry> we were taught to hate in "tech disruptor culture 1.0" Always has been (meme)
- kotaKat 2y ago
  Whatever happened to "app fairness"? Oh, right -- Fairness For Me, Not For Thee.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  If I had bought a CD every 2nd month for 10 years I would have had 60 albums. That is about what Spotify costs. Spotify has been making the music field even more winner takes it all than the old status quo.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    The economics of the music industry were always heavily tilted to the record labels, but Spotify somehow took it even further. Their CEO is a billionnaire for what? Being an unprofitable middle-man that pays $1 to the labels for every $0.80 they get?
theshrike79 2y ago
Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists. People are staying on Spotify just because of inertia and because "everyone" is there, not because it's the best at anything any more.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  >Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists. You mean labels and distributors, the money goes through a lot of people before the artists see any of it.
  - givinguflac 2y ago
    Actually Tidal has a partly direct to artist model, while Apple pays all labels the top-line rate instead of forcing smaller ones to accept less.
- subarctic 2y ago
  I got spotify a year ago because I needed an easy way to just put on some decent music from a playlist a friend sent me when I had people over. Since then I've realized that basically any song that I want to listen to is on there. Am I missing out on a better experience on some other platform? If so, which one and why is it better?
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Sound quality is better and they pay artists more. That's about it. UI quality is a subjective thing.
    - a-french-anon 2y ago
      > Sound quality is better According to https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/audio-quality/ https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/audio-quality/, you can get 256~320 kbps AAC, which is completely transparent if using a good AAC encoder (FDK or Apple qaac).
  - 2y ago
chewz 2y ago
I have used Spotify Audio Features API to display albums and playlist on a radar charts showing acousticness, instrumentalness, energy etc. And to make recomendations (generate playlists) for similiar music based on these charateristics. It has been fun project but now I am glad that I have never considered making anything serious out of it. I did this project because my impression is that Spotify had been always trying to steer me not to music that I like but to music that Spotify makes most money of. It had always been paid promotions over user's tastes in music. And I am not on Spotify anymore for years now. Apple Music have really tasteful recommendations and music curation.
- ravenstine 2y ago
  I worked on the Apple Music frontend and can't help but be pleased people are still using it and are pleased. I remember recommendations being a bug priority, but I wasn't involved with that. Spotify's recommendations aren't as bad as they used to be, but it still thinks I'm more into early 2000s emo rock than the kinds of metal I'm actually into.
  - tyre 2y ago
    I use Apple Music over Spotify whenever possible. The Spotify UX has always been, to me, inferior. Thank you for your work!
    - rootusrootus 2y ago
      I'm torn. I've used both, and I find the Apple Music UI generally superior, but the way that Spotify handles music taste prediction, and how it presents that to the user, is quite a lot better than the Apple Music equivalent.
  - andyferris 2y ago
    It's funny, I had the opposite experience - Spotify understood my taste while Apple Music didn't. (Specifically, Apple Music pushed a lot more Hip Hop/R&B music than I was used to - this was in early 2016 mind you so things may have changed since).
bilekas 2y ago
> As we continue to review the experience provided on Spotify for Developers, we've decided to roll out a number of measures with the aim of creating a more secure platform. I'm sorry but more secure platform to what extent exactly? They're breaking tooling because someone might know what I'm listening to? This is so frustrating along with getting a Spotify update almost every morning.
h4ch1 2y ago
I recently just started using psst which is a Spotify GUI that's much lighter. When you right click a song and go to show similar tracks u get an array of sliders corresponding to the audio analysis/features like valence, danceability, energy, etc to tweak the recommendations. It made a light and day difference for music discoverability for me, while the default spotify radio keeps giving me songs i skip instantly multiple times along with songs I've listened to a hundred times, doing this through the API, is 100x better. I've discovered 30 new songs that I love this past week while that number has been steadily dwindling for the past 6 months using Spotify.
- fallinditch 2y ago
  I've always wanted a slider that gives increasingly eclectic and random selections for the radio playlists. Psst sounds good, I'll try it, hopefully the API changes have not affected it.
  - mr_monkey 2y ago
    We're also working on that very same idea on our open-source music discovery platform ListenBrainz: https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/ https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/ Basically because we had the same gripes about Spotify's "one size fits all" approach ourselves and wanted to develop something better.
    - fallinditch 2y ago
      Spotify has enabled fabulous and powerful music discovery experiences for me. For sure it's not perfect and there are many ways to discover music - I'm really glad that you and others are working on new ideas in this space. But I reckon it will be hard to compete with Spotify's algorithmic playlisting expertise and resources. It would be nice if Spotify added some deeper playlisting functionality tools to give users a bit more control. However, for me, algorithms are just tools and the best 'radio' will always come from DJs and other humans making mixes and music programs.
- adriand 2y ago
mattigames 2y ago
The official app doesn't even have a way to hide all podcasts for good, you have to click "music" at the top every single time you use the app, and now this, never-ending enshitifficattion.
zb3 2y ago
> with the aim of creating a more secure platform. What a bullshit... this is an abuse of the language.
Kkoala 2y ago
That's very sad. The api had some cool stuff. I used to hack with it during COVID, and build e.g. https://tunemeet.com https://tunemeet.com. It generally seemed like they encouraged third-party apps, and I have heard that also used to be the culture inside Spotify, but I guess that's no more.
neilv 2y ago
> Introducing some changes to our Web API This language won't alarm people except those who know they should care about Web API? I guess PR people have to be involved. > Posted November 27, 2024 Isn't the day before Thanksgiving one of the best "Friday news dumps"? (Americans already traveling, followed by 4-day weekend and family obligations.) (Though, while bad news might go unnoticed or unexcorciated by many, due to the holiday timing, the timing might've totally ruined the holiday of someone who had a pending "use case", but hadn't yet gotten API approval for it.)
- conradfr 2y ago
  Not sure a Swedish company cares about Thanksgiving.
  - dewey 2y ago
    I'm not sure you can still limit a company to their origin country if they are so international and things like US holidays impact a lot of marketing activities (ad spend, promotions etc.).
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Depends, does the Swedish company make more money in Sweden or the USA?
neilv 2y ago
If your third-party product/service at the mercy of this Web API access already has the access entitlement it needs, is this move to restrict API access for others a gift that reduces upstart competitor threats to you?
- dankwizard 2y ago
  And the new market, selling API key for access to legacy Spotify APIs! Enquire within
  - neilv 2y ago
    It's the new acquihire: acquiAPIentitlementmire.
radicality 2y ago
Ah damn, that sucks. Just recently someone improved the HomeAssistant integration and added lots more song data, and I see that it stopped working for me because of this (my api key was in development mode)
mellow-lake-day 2y ago
>Algorithmic and Spotify-owned editorial playlists Any guesses if this includes New Releases and Discover Weekly playlists?
- floriancargoet 2y ago
  It looks like Discover Weekly is not longer accessible. Trying to get it by ID returns a 404 and searching or getting playlists returns a list with a null value where I expect the playlist to be.
nsteel 2y ago
As I already posted to the growing thread of discontent at https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Changes-to-Web-API/m-p/6542355/highlight/true#M15738 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Chan... this is Spotify's usual deprecation strategy and they've done this before to their APIs. I think it's usually due to incompetence but this time that feels like only half the story. Sadly, despite their frequent self-sabotage, they still have the best API by a million miles. Anyway, anyone with a private project that doesn't mind a manual step, can grab an access token from https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token using their browser. There's also projects like librespot (and various ports) which can provide access programmatically[0] using Spotify's client ID. Oauth is useless at preventing this kind of access. [0] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options#access-token https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options#acce...).
baq 2y ago
'We analyzed the data and concluded that our users get too much value out of our service. We're left with no other choice than to shut down the services which were causing value leaks.'
laserbeam 2y ago
Does anyone here work at Tidal? Hi there. Tidal... The only reason I still use Spotify is that your search is quite bad. I would love it to be more fuzzy and include approximate results so I can actually find music in it. I have to be TOO exact/specific when searching for something to actually find it, especially if it's niche music. I would also like it to be easier to drag music between playlists/search results. If you fix those 2 things, I will switch. A good search is the only reason Spotify has me hooked.
- wkjagt 2y ago
  This is the exact reason I'm using Spotify instead of the Sonos app to control my Sonos speakers.
  - sensanaty 2y ago
    God Sonos has legitimately the worst UI I've ever seen in my life. Thankfully you can control it through foobar2000, but still
- isodev 2y ago
  The tidal iOS app is also very frustrating to use. I’m not sure leaving Spotify is that easy. Here in Europe, everything is on Spotify - even the podcast my language teacher recommends is Spotify only and it’s not like there are good (as in popular enough) alternatives. Same with music - you don’t want to be the one in the chat group sharing links others can’t play. Green bubble vibes all the way. Also, Spotify Connect - absolutely unmatched flexibility and reliability to play on other devices.
- schrijver 2y ago
  Another thing I like in Spotify is that you can play over any device connected on the same network, so your phone can control the spotify app on your pc, that’s connected to speakers, for example. Tidal only offers this on dedicated hardware (Tidal Connect), like smart amplifiers and streaming boxes, that I have no need for otherwise. I’d love for this to be fixed.
mrweasel 2y ago
YouTube Music basically doesn't have an API. I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving. Someone should do API music, you just get an API token and the API documentation. Having the ability to use something like old-school xmms with an API integration to a streaming service would be amazing.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving. Three aspects: ad blocking, fraud prevention and DRM. Of course all platforms have their internal APIs but if they were to become too public you'd instantly see "artists" artificially bumping up their listener ratios for higher payouts, you'd see people developing third party clients (or patches to first party clients) to evade advertising, and you'd see people just blatantly ripping the catalogue. Of course all of these things happen at the moment already, but the scope is limited for now. Security by obfuscation is not true security, but at least a (massive) impedance.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue. As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter, If I pay $20 per month and play Taylor Swift 24/7 she'd get 100% of the money, minus the 10-20% to run the service, so that's attempting to pump up your own numbers would cause be a money losing exercise. DRM, yeah okay, valid reason.
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      > If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue. IIRC, at least Netflix and Spotify have a "pay less, but get some ads" tiers, and YouTube doesn't want SponsorBlock et al to impact the golden geese too much. > As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter People have scammed streaming services for millions of dollars [1]. Sure, at their scale it's peanuts, but still eyewatering sums of money for normal people. [1] https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-ai/the-10-million-spotify-scam https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-ai/the-10-million-spotify-s...
prophesi 2y ago
While we're thinking of alternatives to Spotify, for years I've been buying albums straight from Bandcamp whenever possible, and HDTracks/etc for artists not on that platform. Then toss up the FLAC/MP3's on my Jellyfin server. I'm pretty sure artists get a lot more of your money that way, and you're not locked into yet another streaming platform that doesn't let you own the actual music files.
- dawnerd 2y ago
  I wish there was a way to buy movies this way. I know there’s a rental service but you have to use their hardware.
  - tassadarforaiur 2y ago
    Drm free digital video purchase doesn't seem to be a thing, but buying DVDs / blu rays and ripping them to a Plex / jellyfin server has gotten pretty approachable.
    - aquova 2y ago
      It's a real shame, I would be happy to buy DRM-free movies digitally, but afaik there is no marketplace for big name films. The studios certainly don't want it and the streaming services removed large demand for it (at least until quite recently). Fortunately, the physical market still allows for such things. That's my current path. Ripping Blu-rays isn't trivial, requiring specific drives and often replacing the firmware, but once you get it set up it's quite convenient. Naturally though, the digital piracy framework is much easier and more common, but I still like actually owning my movies.
      - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
        It is moral (legality is flawed, copyright is a sham, etc) that if you own a piece of media that you can own it in every digital form based on that media. I.e., buy the disk and pirate it to your Jellyfin to avoid the annoyance of ripping the disk. VPNs are cheap and the *arr software suite is quite capable.
ryukoposting 2y ago
Welcome to our AI-powered future, where all sources of useful information are guarded by castle walls.
pmdr 2y ago
APIs that don't put money on the table are being phased out. Musk did it with twitter and it didn't die (I'm not debating quality/financials). Then reddit did it (and even blocked VPNs) and it didn't die. Sure, it might've lost some quality, but the stock is up 200% since March. So as long as they're winning, every corp is going to either shut down APIs or absurdly gouge prices. This is the new internet that we've voted for with money and attention.
- authorfly 2y ago
  Not trying to be "that douchey old times" guy but back in 2005 you could access many APIs for things like weather, temperature, ongoing projects, lists of conference locations, lists of RSS subscriptions, insect population predictions, all sorts. Today they still exist, but with the exception of the most basic and dated corporate free APIs (e.g. reddit) they are gated by API keys and often access limits. It was truly rare to see access limits in 2005; APIs were slow and unreliable but not limited. If anyone documented the loss of APIs (particularly in 2008 IIRC?) I would to read more about it myself too. I think Tom Scott did a video on this, but I can't find it.
  - pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
    So it seems old times weren’t that douchey.
  - brogrammernot 2y ago
    To recap: - no one locked down APIs - you could access a wide variety of them - no limits on them - they were slow and unreliable As APIs became reliable & fast, they imposed limits on them So not sure what was lost considering it sounds like they didn’t work well and when they did work they were incredibly slow aka self imposed rate limiting
- alkonaut 2y ago
  Were these APIs just free and open? Open to subscribers or to anyone? Because I'd be happy to pay a bit more to have api access to a service I use, perhaps because I'm using some 3rd party software etc. For example, now I'm using offical apps for Reddit and Twitter, whereas in the past I used great third party apps (Apollo and Tweetbot) which were an order of magnitude better. Sure, they never showed the ads. But just let me pay with money instead of using a shitty app and seeing ads?
dbg31415 2y ago
Spotify recently reported record profits, but at what cost? After raising prices, cutting payouts to artists, and laying off a significant number of employees, Spotify managed to post a $499M profit. It just doesn’t sit right with me when a company thriving financially decides to cut jobs and squeeze artists even further. The only thing that’s kept me on Spotify is the family plan—I didn’t want the hassle of setting things up again for my elderly parents. But the prices have shot up fast. Here’s a comparison of current family plans: * Spotify: $19.99 (for 6 people) * Pandora: $17.99 (for 6 people) * Apple Music: $16.99 (for 5 people) I remember when I first signed up, the Spotify family plan was just $12.99. Hard to believe how much it’s increased in just a few years. Recent News * Spotify Rakes in $499M Profit After Lowering Artist Royalties Using Bundling Strategy | Headphonesty || https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/11/spotify-reports-499m-operating-profit/ https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/11/spotify-reports-499m-op... * Spotify to lay off 17% of employees — read the full memo CEO Daniel Ek sent to staff members || https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/spotify-lay-17-employees-read-full-memo-ceo-daniel-ek-sent-staff-rcna127868 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/spotify-lay-17-employ...
maxehmookau 2y ago
Ever since they decided to spend hundreds of millions on Rogan whilst also gouging artists, I've been looking for an alternative to Spotify. This might be the push I needed.
nzoschke 2y ago
The hostility towards users and developers continues. I have a fun Spotify web app that gives you an old school jukebox experience. I recently open sourced it as a final act of giving myself and all our users freedom to control our music and music playing experience. https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab But I’m laying foundations to move off from Spotify. Their playback SDKs are buggy and by default always give up control to the recommendation algorithm. APIs get shut down. Developers bugs and questions go unanswered. Trying to control Sonos + Spotify is some sort of cruel prank. Albums and tracks in your collection go dark. For me I’ve switched to Tidal for streaming which at least for now is does well at the raw basics of playing high quality music. Tunemymusic is good for copying playlists. Then to Bandcamp for buying dance music to DJ. I’m very close to buying and ripping CDs again to truly have control.
- 6u556u56uy56 2y ago
  I am amazed at how many people don't get what is going on. These companies business models rely on free money economics, and with interest rates up they cannot survive which means all of the growth they targeted is now a huge problem. Platforms are becoming hostile towards its users because they are quite literally telling you to kick rocks and go elsewhere. They do not want your business because it costs them too much money.
kpilars 2y ago
One of the gratest Spotify tools is : https://everynoise.com/#otherthings https://everynoise.com/#otherthings I hope they will long live
zdenham 2y ago
Spotify api also requires extension requests now. The review process takes 10+ weeks and has no discourse :(
marstall 2y ago
Apple Music's API still going strong. I use it my minimal, "just the good parts" alternative Apple Music client: https://shelf.fm https://shelf.fm https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shelf-fm/id1520498918 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shelf-fm/id1520498918
lazycouchpotato 2y ago
Unfortunate. I love https://www.chosic.com/ https://www.chosic.com/ to discover new music that uses the Spotify Web API. While this update claims it's for new apps, if there's anything we've learned from Twitter, Reddit, etc. is that they will eventually kill all third-party apps.
lolive 2y ago
Resurrect spotifynewmusic.com. Please !!!
- lolive 2y ago
  Note: this was a playlist s publisher, based on the recommendations of the good music news website. Jlarome, if you read that, publish the code. PLEASE !!!

293 points by leecoursey 2y ago

snvzz 2y ago

Remember: FLAC files don't lose API endpoints.

wavemode 2y ago
"Physical books don't run out of battery" type energy.
- acidburnNSA 2y ago
  Flac files have most of the benefits of streaming, whereas physical books are a lot less like digital books. You can instantly purchase and download flac files, sync them across devices, play them over networks, duplicate them, hold thousands of them on your phone, etc.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Also I can shrink my FLACs into 256kbps OPUS and store ~9 hours of audio in 1GB. I cannot (easily) shrink my physical books into microfilm and read them. The better comparison is PDF + OCR’d text VS Kindle.
    - GrantMoyer 2y ago
      An aside: for stereo audio, even 128kbps OPUS is probably overkill[1]. [1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings
      - snvzz 2y ago
        OPUS is great for low-bandwidth situation. The best. But it is lossy, and thus not a good archival format. At some point, there'll be better lossy formats than OPUS, and then we'll need the lossless source again.
toxican 2y ago
They also don't only cost $12/mo for access to pretty much everything I'd ever want to listen to.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Is that $12/mo truly worth it? I mean, do you find 13+ new songs you genuinely enjoy every month? And would the alternative media be so expensive that you couldn’t build your library using that $12/mo, over a reasonable period of time? I know for me that it’s not worth it, I can buy 3-4 CDs for that $12, even less if I find some good deals, and I’ve had better luck finding new music at the Goodwill than I have with Spotify.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    > buy 3-4 CDs I'd wager that there's a good number of people that don't even own a CD player anymore. $12/month to have music to listen to, even if I don't have new tracks pushed on to me, seems like a reasonable deal to me to not have to deal with the hassle of hosting it on my own server and, what, ripping my CDs to mp3s? If a friend comes in and wants to hear something, Spotify is more likely to have it than my local mp3 collection.
    - badmintonbaseba 2y ago
      Owning your music files doesn't necessarily imply that you have to by them physically on CDs. Of course the music you are interested in might not be available in your preferred format or on your preferred streaming platform.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      Yes, and it’s a shame people have abandoned physical media. Who said you had to host it though? You can also simply keep them on your phone. 1GB of storage comes out to around 20 hours of 128kbps OPUS, which will sound identical to Spotify’s offerings, and takes all of a few minutes to rip the disk, have a program automatically tag the metadata, and convert every song to OPUS. It’s also more likely that your friend will find their music on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you should get YouTube Premium.
flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
FLAC also doesn't give you the information these google'd API's did. My bicycle won't run out of gas but that doesn't mean it's more useful/reliable than my car for a cross country road trip
- snvzz 2y ago
  What if I told you, FLAC supports metadata? That way, you can have the information you need w/o being tracked.
  - flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
    I think my comment laid out the problem very clearly. You need a _source_ for the information, not a place to persist it. Do you have a solution for how to cheaply extract features from songs? If yes, I'd love to hear about it, but if not, your evangelism and impotent attempts to defend it are not productive to this conversation.

leecoursey 2y ago

Spotify announced they have shut down several API endpoints, effective immediately. They have grandfathered in existing apps that have extended mode Web API access.

leecoursey 2y ago

Unfortunately, this breaks a lot of custom python programs I was using to facilitate music discovery and to generate playlists for myself.

Yajirobe 2y ago
It doesn’t affect existing apps > Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.
- danielkuntz 2y ago
  Doesn't affect existing apps with extended mode access, for which you have to apply and be approved. Gives you a higher ratelimit so you can ship to production. Plenty of people (me included) build small widgets for themselves without bothering to apply for extended.
- echoangle 2y ago
  > These changes will impact the following Web API applications: - Existing apps that are still in development mode without a pending extension request - New apps that are registered on or after today's date Most people writing small scripts were probably using an API key with development mode.
  - leecoursey 2y ago
    > Most people writing small scripts were probably using an API key with development mode. Yep, me included. Since my apps were never meant as anything more than utilities for myself, I never applied for extended access. Nevertheless, I used these tools multiple times a day, especially for sorting and filtering playlists by audio features such as energy and valence. Now, apparently, they will never work again. I'm sure there are plenty of other hobbyists in the same boat.
    - nsteel 2y ago
      Even for those that want extended access, what's suppose to be a simple review process is absolutely broken. Their dev forum is full of people who have applied and been left waiting for months with no communication.

smashah 2y ago

Godspeed to all the OSS Adversarial Interoperability reverse engineers! APIs should be a digital human right.

RockRobotRock 2y ago
De-enshittify by any means necessary!
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Companies are going to continue to enshittify as long as customers refuse to leave them. There's no incentive not to. People who want to do stuff like making custom apps or scripts that use these APIs should instead be building their own music servers.
  - thejazzman 2y ago
    PlexAMP is awesome
  - sham1 2y ago
    And when one is building this kind of a music server, please support your favourite artists! Ideally, if they have a Bandcamp or something similar, where you can directly buy their tracks and albums from them, do that. Usually this means that you can get access to high-quality FLACs and whatnot, but it will also mean that more money will go directly to the artists (usually money going to the record label and whatnot is unavoidable even with this, but there will still be fewer people in the middle). And well, if that's not a thing, then at least try to buy the tracks from somewhere, so that they at least see some return on their efforts. Maybe physical CDs and the like. The point is just to be able to support your favourite artists!
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Your suggestions are fine, but if you really want to support your favorite musicians, you should attend their concerts and buy merchandise there. They personally get far more profit from ticket sales and merch sales than from selling music directly. And of course, the concert experience is something way beyond just listening to a track from Bandcamp or a CD.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Are any alternative APIs (non Spotify) available for the functionality being deprecated in this notice?

danielkuntz 2y ago
Not any good ones unfortunately! Great opportunity for someone to make one while other platforms are still scrapeable.
- leoh 2y ago
  You don’t need to scrape other platforms. LLMs are already probably pretty darn good at this.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Can LLMs analyze song features (danceability, instrumentalness, speechiness, tempo)?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      Audio analysis is one of the easiest problems that ML can deal with. The problem is, how can you use a pretrained LLM for discovering newly-released music? And how do you train future models without a source of new data?
      - echoangle 2y ago
        > Audio analysis is one of the easiest problems that ML can deal with. Maybe, but that doesn’t tell me anything about LLMs. I’m not saying that it’s a particularly hard problem, I’m surprised that an LLM specifically would be good for this purpose.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        Yeah, there seems to be an unfortunate trend towards using "LLM" when people really mean "transformer."

RGamma 2y ago

> Kills API > Third party integrations continue to play an important role in the way users can experience the Spotify experience through third party apps. We evaluate the set up of our platform on an ongoing basis and remain committed to ensuring it provides the best possible opportunities for developers, artists, creators and listeners. Read that as: Hell yeah, we're gonna enshittify.

Pesthuf 2y ago
Has the same ring as "we value your privacy. That’s why we and our 739 partners want to track everything you do, link it to your real ID and sell it off to anyone willing to buy."
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  The New Jersey Transit app really wants me to enable location tracking for the app. It really opens up the settings app every time I buy or activate a ticket. I'm sure location tracking would really help me buy tickets and have the QR code scanned by a conductor.

dxxvi 2y ago

Long time ago, spotify allowed us to create, modify our playlists through end points. Now, it's impossible.

tim-- 2y ago
When did this stop being supported by Spotify? https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/create-playlist https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/reorder-or-replace-playlists-tracks https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/remove-tracks-playlist https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... I think you are talking about "Get Featured Playlists", which is more geared towards Spotify created playlists, which is under the 'Browse' tab in Spotify.

specproc 2y ago

This is very sad, and another nudge away from Spotify for me. I remember the API being a motivator for signing up, and I've hacked together a few toys with it over the years. Realistically now, the only benefit Spotify provides over my MP3 collection is that it's better organised.

theshrike79 2y ago
Musicbrainz Picard + PlexAmp is a pretty good solution. Picard sets _all_ the metadata on the music and PlexAmp uses it to create playlists with the OpenAI API.
- specproc 2y ago
  Nice, thanks for the rec. I'd seen beets as well which also looks good. Spotify is definitely the lowest hanging fruit for culling on my subscription list. The API was very much part of the value proposition. I don't believe it's even that good a deal for artists. I heard the mighty Snoop Dogg makes like USD 40K a year off it or something stupid like that.
  - bytefish 2y ago
    Snoop Dogg made USD 40k for one song, which also has multiple songwriters on it. There’s a good breakdown in [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ba0ggi/comment/ktzcbq4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ba0ggi/...
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      Key phrase from that research: > I'm not sure how much royalties you can expect when you're one of 17 credited songwriters on one song you don't even own which samples a song that also samples songs...I think $45k is pretty damned good.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    > I don't believe it's even that good a deal for artists. I heard the mighty Snoop Dogg makes like USD 40K a year off it or something stupid like that. What would be the non-stupid amount for Snoop Dogg to make off it?

ribadeo 2y ago

Spotify siphons yet more income artists should be getting into corporate coffers and Daniel Ek's bank account. No music lover should be using Spotify. They are notorious for driving the downward trend in streaming payments to artists. They are arguably worse than the worst of the old Music Industry we were taught to hate in "tech disruptor culture 1.0". Bandcamp revenue goes straight to artists, largely. I got 89 out of 99 dollars paid on a release of mine.

leoh 2y ago
Good to point out and I’m with you but… fwiw… I think the intersection of people that are upset about a free recommendation API being cancelled and people who want a music platform that pays artists fairly is essentially zero. So yeah
blitzar 2y ago
> arguably worse than the worst of the old <insert industry> we were taught to hate in "tech disruptor culture 1.0" Always has been (meme)
kotaKat 2y ago
Whatever happened to "app fairness"? Oh, right -- Fairness For Me, Not For Thee.
rightbyte 2y ago
If I had bought a CD every 2nd month for 10 years I would have had 60 albums. That is about what Spotify costs. Spotify has been making the music field even more winner takes it all than the old status quo.
- rchaud 2y ago
  The economics of the music industry were always heavily tilted to the record labels, but Spotify somehow took it even further. Their CEO is a billionnaire for what? Being an unprofitable middle-man that pays $1 to the labels for every $0.80 they get?

theshrike79 2y ago

Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists. People are staying on Spotify just because of inertia and because "everyone" is there, not because it's the best at anything any more.

whywhywhywhy 2y ago
>Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists. You mean labels and distributors, the money goes through a lot of people before the artists see any of it.
- givinguflac 2y ago
  Actually Tidal has a partly direct to artist model, while Apple pays all labels the top-line rate instead of forcing smaller ones to accept less.
subarctic 2y ago
I got spotify a year ago because I needed an easy way to just put on some decent music from a playlist a friend sent me when I had people over. Since then I've realized that basically any song that I want to listen to is on there. Am I missing out on a better experience on some other platform? If so, which one and why is it better?
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Sound quality is better and they pay artists more. That's about it. UI quality is a subjective thing.
  - a-french-anon 2y ago
    > Sound quality is better According to https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/audio-quality/ https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/audio-quality/, you can get 256~320 kbps AAC, which is completely transparent if using a good AAC encoder (FDK or Apple qaac).
- 2y ago

chewz 2y ago

I have used Spotify Audio Features API to display albums and playlist on a radar charts showing acousticness, instrumentalness, energy etc. And to make recomendations (generate playlists) for similiar music based on these charateristics. It has been fun project but now I am glad that I have never considered making anything serious out of it. I did this project because my impression is that Spotify had been always trying to steer me not to music that I like but to music that Spotify makes most money of. It had always been paid promotions over user's tastes in music. And I am not on Spotify anymore for years now. Apple Music have really tasteful recommendations and music curation.

ravenstine 2y ago
I worked on the Apple Music frontend and can't help but be pleased people are still using it and are pleased. I remember recommendations being a bug priority, but I wasn't involved with that. Spotify's recommendations aren't as bad as they used to be, but it still thinks I'm more into early 2000s emo rock than the kinds of metal I'm actually into.
- tyre 2y ago
  I use Apple Music over Spotify whenever possible. The Spotify UX has always been, to me, inferior. Thank you for your work!
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    I'm torn. I've used both, and I find the Apple Music UI generally superior, but the way that Spotify handles music taste prediction, and how it presents that to the user, is quite a lot better than the Apple Music equivalent.
- andyferris 2y ago
  It's funny, I had the opposite experience - Spotify understood my taste while Apple Music didn't. (Specifically, Apple Music pushed a lot more Hip Hop/R&B music than I was used to - this was in early 2016 mind you so things may have changed since).

bilekas 2y ago

> As we continue to review the experience provided on Spotify for Developers, we've decided to roll out a number of measures with the aim of creating a more secure platform. I'm sorry but more secure platform to what extent exactly? They're breaking tooling because someone might know what I'm listening to? This is so frustrating along with getting a Spotify update almost every morning.

h4ch1 2y ago

I recently just started using psst which is a Spotify GUI that's much lighter. When you right click a song and go to show similar tracks u get an array of sliders corresponding to the audio analysis/features like valence, danceability, energy, etc to tweak the recommendations. It made a light and day difference for music discoverability for me, while the default spotify radio keeps giving me songs i skip instantly multiple times along with songs I've listened to a hundred times, doing this through the API, is 100x better. I've discovered 30 new songs that I love this past week while that number has been steadily dwindling for the past 6 months using Spotify.

fallinditch 2y ago
I've always wanted a slider that gives increasingly eclectic and random selections for the radio playlists. Psst sounds good, I'll try it, hopefully the API changes have not affected it.
- mr_monkey 2y ago
  We're also working on that very same idea on our open-source music discovery platform ListenBrainz: https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/ https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/ Basically because we had the same gripes about Spotify's "one size fits all" approach ourselves and wanted to develop something better.
  - fallinditch 2y ago
    Spotify has enabled fabulous and powerful music discovery experiences for me. For sure it's not perfect and there are many ways to discover music - I'm really glad that you and others are working on new ideas in this space. But I reckon it will be hard to compete with Spotify's algorithmic playlisting expertise and resources. It would be nice if Spotify added some deeper playlisting functionality tools to give users a bit more control. However, for me, algorithms are just tools and the best 'radio' will always come from DJs and other humans making mixes and music programs.
adriand 2y ago

mattigames 2y ago

The official app doesn't even have a way to hide all podcasts for good, you have to click "music" at the top every single time you use the app, and now this, never-ending enshitifficattion.

zb3 2y ago

> with the aim of creating a more secure platform. What a bullshit... this is an abuse of the language.

Kkoala 2y ago

That's very sad. The api had some cool stuff. I used to hack with it during COVID, and build e.g. https://tunemeet.com https://tunemeet.com. It generally seemed like they encouraged third-party apps, and I have heard that also used to be the culture inside Spotify, but I guess that's no more.

neilv 2y ago

> Introducing some changes to our Web API This language won't alarm people except those who know they should care about Web API? I guess PR people have to be involved. > Posted November 27, 2024 Isn't the day before Thanksgiving one of the best "Friday news dumps"? (Americans already traveling, followed by 4-day weekend and family obligations.) (Though, while bad news might go unnoticed or unexcorciated by many, due to the holiday timing, the timing might've totally ruined the holiday of someone who had a pending "use case", but hadn't yet gotten API approval for it.)

conradfr 2y ago
Not sure a Swedish company cares about Thanksgiving.
- dewey 2y ago
  I'm not sure you can still limit a company to their origin country if they are so international and things like US holidays impact a lot of marketing activities (ad spend, promotions etc.).
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Depends, does the Swedish company make more money in Sweden or the USA?

neilv 2y ago

If your third-party product/service at the mercy of this Web API access already has the access entitlement it needs, is this move to restrict API access for others a gift that reduces upstart competitor threats to you?

dankwizard 2y ago
And the new market, selling API key for access to legacy Spotify APIs! Enquire within
- neilv 2y ago
  It's the new acquihire: acquiAPIentitlementmire.

radicality 2y ago

Ah damn, that sucks. Just recently someone improved the HomeAssistant integration and added lots more song data, and I see that it stopped working for me because of this (my api key was in development mode)

mellow-lake-day 2y ago

>Algorithmic and Spotify-owned editorial playlists Any guesses if this includes New Releases and Discover Weekly playlists?

floriancargoet 2y ago
It looks like Discover Weekly is not longer accessible. Trying to get it by ID returns a 404 and searching or getting playlists returns a list with a null value where I expect the playlist to be.

nsteel 2y ago

As I already posted to the growing thread of discontent at https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Changes-to-Web-API/m-p/6542355/highlight/true#M15738 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Chan... this is Spotify's usual deprecation strategy and they've done this before to their APIs. I think it's usually due to incompetence but this time that feels like only half the story. Sadly, despite their frequent self-sabotage, they still have the best API by a million miles. Anyway, anyone with a private project that doesn't mind a manual step, can grab an access token from https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token using their browser. There's also projects like librespot (and various ports) which can provide access programmatically[0] using Spotify's client ID. Oauth is useless at preventing this kind of access. [0] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options#access-token https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options#acce...).

baq 2y ago

'We analyzed the data and concluded that our users get too much value out of our service. We're left with no other choice than to shut down the services which were causing value leaks.'

laserbeam 2y ago

Does anyone here work at Tidal? Hi there. Tidal... The only reason I still use Spotify is that your search is quite bad. I would love it to be more fuzzy and include approximate results so I can actually find music in it. I have to be TOO exact/specific when searching for something to actually find it, especially if it's niche music. I would also like it to be easier to drag music between playlists/search results. If you fix those 2 things, I will switch. A good search is the only reason Spotify has me hooked.

wkjagt 2y ago
This is the exact reason I'm using Spotify instead of the Sonos app to control my Sonos speakers.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  God Sonos has legitimately the worst UI I've ever seen in my life. Thankfully you can control it through foobar2000, but still
isodev 2y ago
The tidal iOS app is also very frustrating to use. I’m not sure leaving Spotify is that easy. Here in Europe, everything is on Spotify - even the podcast my language teacher recommends is Spotify only and it’s not like there are good (as in popular enough) alternatives. Same with music - you don’t want to be the one in the chat group sharing links others can’t play. Green bubble vibes all the way. Also, Spotify Connect - absolutely unmatched flexibility and reliability to play on other devices.
schrijver 2y ago
Another thing I like in Spotify is that you can play over any device connected on the same network, so your phone can control the spotify app on your pc, that’s connected to speakers, for example. Tidal only offers this on dedicated hardware (Tidal Connect), like smart amplifiers and streaming boxes, that I have no need for otherwise. I’d love for this to be fixed.

mrweasel 2y ago

YouTube Music basically doesn't have an API. I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving. Someone should do API music, you just get an API token and the API documentation. Having the ability to use something like old-school xmms with an API integration to a streaming service would be amazing.

mschuster91 2y ago
> I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving. Three aspects: ad blocking, fraud prevention and DRM. Of course all platforms have their internal APIs but if they were to become too public you'd instantly see "artists" artificially bumping up their listener ratios for higher payouts, you'd see people developing third party clients (or patches to first party clients) to evade advertising, and you'd see people just blatantly ripping the catalogue. Of course all of these things happen at the moment already, but the scope is limited for now. Security by obfuscation is not true security, but at least a (massive) impedance.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue. As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter, If I pay $20 per month and play Taylor Swift 24/7 she'd get 100% of the money, minus the 10-20% to run the service, so that's attempting to pump up your own numbers would cause be a money losing exercise. DRM, yeah okay, valid reason.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue. IIRC, at least Netflix and Spotify have a "pay less, but get some ads" tiers, and YouTube doesn't want SponsorBlock et al to impact the golden geese too much. > As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter People have scammed streaming services for millions of dollars [1]. Sure, at their scale it's peanuts, but still eyewatering sums of money for normal people. [1] https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-ai/the-10-million-spotify-scam https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-ai/the-10-million-spotify-s...

prophesi 2y ago

While we're thinking of alternatives to Spotify, for years I've been buying albums straight from Bandcamp whenever possible, and HDTracks/etc for artists not on that platform. Then toss up the FLAC/MP3's on my Jellyfin server. I'm pretty sure artists get a lot more of your money that way, and you're not locked into yet another streaming platform that doesn't let you own the actual music files.

dawnerd 2y ago
I wish there was a way to buy movies this way. I know there’s a rental service but you have to use their hardware.
- tassadarforaiur 2y ago
  Drm free digital video purchase doesn't seem to be a thing, but buying DVDs / blu rays and ripping them to a Plex / jellyfin server has gotten pretty approachable.
  - aquova 2y ago
    It's a real shame, I would be happy to buy DRM-free movies digitally, but afaik there is no marketplace for big name films. The studios certainly don't want it and the streaming services removed large demand for it (at least until quite recently). Fortunately, the physical market still allows for such things. That's my current path. Ripping Blu-rays isn't trivial, requiring specific drives and often replacing the firmware, but once you get it set up it's quite convenient. Naturally though, the digital piracy framework is much easier and more common, but I still like actually owning my movies.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      It is moral (legality is flawed, copyright is a sham, etc) that if you own a piece of media that you can own it in every digital form based on that media. I.e., buy the disk and pirate it to your Jellyfin to avoid the annoyance of ripping the disk. VPNs are cheap and the *arr software suite is quite capable.

ryukoposting 2y ago

Welcome to our AI-powered future, where all sources of useful information are guarded by castle walls.

pmdr 2y ago

APIs that don't put money on the table are being phased out. Musk did it with twitter and it didn't die (I'm not debating quality/financials). Then reddit did it (and even blocked VPNs) and it didn't die. Sure, it might've lost some quality, but the stock is up 200% since March. So as long as they're winning, every corp is going to either shut down APIs or absurdly gouge prices. This is the new internet that we've voted for with money and attention.

authorfly 2y ago
Not trying to be "that douchey old times" guy but back in 2005 you could access many APIs for things like weather, temperature, ongoing projects, lists of conference locations, lists of RSS subscriptions, insect population predictions, all sorts. Today they still exist, but with the exception of the most basic and dated corporate free APIs (e.g. reddit) they are gated by API keys and often access limits. It was truly rare to see access limits in 2005; APIs were slow and unreliable but not limited. If anyone documented the loss of APIs (particularly in 2008 IIRC?) I would to read more about it myself too. I think Tom Scott did a video on this, but I can't find it.
- pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
  So it seems old times weren’t that douchey.
- brogrammernot 2y ago
  To recap: - no one locked down APIs - you could access a wide variety of them - no limits on them - they were slow and unreliable As APIs became reliable & fast, they imposed limits on them So not sure what was lost considering it sounds like they didn’t work well and when they did work they were incredibly slow aka self imposed rate limiting
alkonaut 2y ago
Were these APIs just free and open? Open to subscribers or to anyone? Because I'd be happy to pay a bit more to have api access to a service I use, perhaps because I'm using some 3rd party software etc. For example, now I'm using offical apps for Reddit and Twitter, whereas in the past I used great third party apps (Apollo and Tweetbot) which were an order of magnitude better. Sure, they never showed the ads. But just let me pay with money instead of using a shitty app and seeing ads?

dbg31415 2y ago

Spotify recently reported record profits, but at what cost? After raising prices, cutting payouts to artists, and laying off a significant number of employees, Spotify managed to post a $499M profit. It just doesn’t sit right with me when a company thriving financially decides to cut jobs and squeeze artists even further. The only thing that’s kept me on Spotify is the family plan—I didn’t want the hassle of setting things up again for my elderly parents. But the prices have shot up fast. Here’s a comparison of current family plans: * Spotify: $19.99 (for 6 people) * Pandora: $17.99 (for 6 people) * Apple Music: $16.99 (for 5 people) I remember when I first signed up, the Spotify family plan was just $12.99. Hard to believe how much it’s increased in just a few years. Recent News * Spotify Rakes in $499M Profit After Lowering Artist Royalties Using Bundling Strategy | Headphonesty || https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/11/spotify-reports-499m-operating-profit/ https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/11/spotify-reports-499m-op... * Spotify to lay off 17% of employees — read the full memo CEO Daniel Ek sent to staff members || https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/spotify-lay-17-employees-read-full-memo-ceo-daniel-ek-sent-staff-rcna127868 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/spotify-lay-17-employ...

maxehmookau 2y ago

Ever since they decided to spend hundreds of millions on Rogan whilst also gouging artists, I've been looking for an alternative to Spotify. This might be the push I needed.

nzoschke 2y ago

The hostility towards users and developers continues. I have a fun Spotify web app that gives you an old school jukebox experience. I recently open sourced it as a final act of giving myself and all our users freedom to control our music and music playing experience. https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab But I’m laying foundations to move off from Spotify. Their playback SDKs are buggy and by default always give up control to the recommendation algorithm. APIs get shut down. Developers bugs and questions go unanswered. Trying to control Sonos + Spotify is some sort of cruel prank. Albums and tracks in your collection go dark. For me I’ve switched to Tidal for streaming which at least for now is does well at the raw basics of playing high quality music. Tunemymusic is good for copying playlists. Then to Bandcamp for buying dance music to DJ. I’m very close to buying and ripping CDs again to truly have control.

6u556u56uy56 2y ago
I am amazed at how many people don't get what is going on. These companies business models rely on free money economics, and with interest rates up they cannot survive which means all of the growth they targeted is now a huge problem. Platforms are becoming hostile towards its users because they are quite literally telling you to kick rocks and go elsewhere. They do not want your business because it costs them too much money.

kpilars 2y ago

One of the gratest Spotify tools is : https://everynoise.com/#otherthings https://everynoise.com/#otherthings I hope they will long live

zdenham 2y ago

Spotify api also requires extension requests now. The review process takes 10+ weeks and has no discourse :(

marstall 2y ago

Apple Music's API still going strong. I use it my minimal, "just the good parts" alternative Apple Music client: https://shelf.fm https://shelf.fm https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shelf-fm/id1520498918 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shelf-fm/id1520498918

lazycouchpotato 2y ago

Unfortunate. I love https://www.chosic.com/ https://www.chosic.com/ to discover new music that uses the Spotify Web API. While this update claims it's for new apps, if there's anything we've learned from Twitter, Reddit, etc. is that they will eventually kill all third-party apps.

lolive 2y ago

Resurrect spotifynewmusic.com. Please !!!

lolive 2y ago
Note: this was a playlist s publisher, based on the recommendations of the good music news website. Jlarome, if you read that, publish the code. PLEASE !!!