People are staying on Spotify just because of inertia and because "everyone" is there, not because it's the best at anything any more.
I use Firefox on BSD which doesn't have DRM support so the web versions of Apple Music and Deezer don't work properly. On Apple it only plays the first 30 seconds of each song and I forget what the problem was with Deezer.
Also a real app is way nicer than a web interface of course. And with libspotify I can even change songs that play on my mobile and control it through home assistant.
None of the others allow third party clients or open source. Sure it's a niche reason but this is the reason I'm on Spotify and not somewhere else. I've tried other platforms for a month but it was crap.
I only listen to big artists anyway that are well compensated.
Having to go through the iPhone two factor dance every time I want to just play music is so annoying that it's made me consider going back to Spotify.
He's very knowledgable about music, great interviewer and seems to be in his element.
All they are really doing is using VC money to pay artists a lil bit more to seem more enticing.
At least a new player means artists and users are slightly more screwed over than before, until this batch of VC money runs dry.
Fortunately, unlike with e.g. Uber or Grubhub & similar, the music streaming startups aren't screwing society over by destroying more sustainable local competition, so I think in this case, the best course of action is to make full use of all the freebies and best deals in this space, because the more VC money we burn, the better off we (users) and artists are.
It'll eventually collapse, too, but there won't be a fallout, since all those companies do right now is compete with each other over distribution rights. The songs won't go away.
I mean, respectfully, I really don’t care about their profitability if : 1) I get to pay reasonable price 2) artists are paid a reasonable prices 3) VCs are ok to throw money at it for any reason.
On the current state of affairs, everyone is happy (or at least happier than Spotify).
Is it future proof ? Probably not, but it’s a little more present proof than Spotify.
If someday this equation changes or the company collapses, well, I’ll just go elsewhere.
And if the industry is not capable in itself to handle the use case of paying a monthly fee to be able to listen to music while remunerating artists, given that humanity in general never paid as much money just for music in the whole human history, it would just mean that they are incredibly stupid and that they deserve the piracy.
You mean labels and distributors, the money goes through a lot of people before the artists see any of it.
UI quality is a subjective thing.
I refuse to use anything Apple out of principle.
Slightly lower price for the same catalog size.
I would assume that people with 'principles' would not use any of these subscription companies.
I'd switch to Apple in a heartbeat if it had a good client for Linux.
Their pro-rata model is a joke. It's designed to favor big labels who btw are also shareholders of Spotify.
For those who don't know, the money of subscriptions goes into a big pot and then it's distributed based on the total number of plays. Which means the subscription I'm paying, for the most part, doesn't go to the artists I listen to but instead goes to the big labels who represent popular artists.
It's as if, back when people bought physical records, Madonna got money when you bought a record from some indie band.
Seems like Apple pays 3x what Spotify pays? It can't be as simple as that though.
Once you've tried it there's no turning back.
People have been begging for that for ages on Spotify’s forum…
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.
However, the whole "Spotify is terrible for artists" argument seems ill considered. Terrible compared to what? I lot of what I buy is relatively niche artists on relatively niche labels, who would never have been signed to a major and would never had had international distribution. These artists can't make a living through streaming, sure, but I don't think they could have made a living in the old world, either.
I still have a Spotify subscription - mostly for the family - but I use it to listen to albums before deciding to buy them. I'd buy a lot less if I couldn't vet it on Spotify first.
A lot of artists seem to think that they're entitled to make a living off their art, which seems to me to completely misunderstand the history of the music industry.
Or just the history of value in general. People definitely love music and will pay for it, but not for everyone who makes music.
I've still got my hand on the trigger waiting to download my entire library as lossless FLAC and jump ship, but so far it seems like it's been mostly business as usual.
Spotify has been making the music field even more winner takes it all than the old status quo.
Are we just opposite ends of the music acquisition spectrum?
Always has been (meme)
This is why any touring band asks you to buy merch, they eat on the money from merch
They aren't profitable.
It doesn't matter if its 70 or 99.99%.
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
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.
I think you’re missing the real cause of this shift: These free APIs existed during the investment-fueled growth phase, then disappeared when they started switching into the real business mode.
We had an unusually long period of time where companies could play the startup game of spending money and headcount on things that didn’t generate much or any revenue. Free APIs were an artifact of that. The disappearance of the Twitter and Reddit APIs coincides with them shifting toward profitability.
You don’t have to “vote for” anything for this to happen. When it stops being easy to run companies at a loss year over year, the parts of the company that aren’t generating more revenue than they cost either get price increases or dropped entirely.
I’ve been at a startup-like company going through this change. It was sad, though not at all surprising, when management started taking inventory of everything people were working on and cross referencing it with how much that was generating in revenue. There were a few moments of internal revelation when someone realized that entire teams of expensive engineers had been working on features and products that either very few people used or that were very complex but generated no revenue. It doesn’t make business sense.
The abuse landscape has also changed dramatically. In the early days, free APIs were rarely used features by a few power users. Now, any free API is guaranteed to be abused by some growth hacking startup who wants to vacuum up all of your data and use it for SEO spam, AI training, or other purposes.
Not just profitability, but more profit.
> You don’t have to “vote for” anything for this to happen.
No, but once they shut the door on 3rd party apps people still use the services, even if it's a shittier experience. So why wouldn't they restrict or shut down APIs?
Any platform that relies on serving ads will not have a full-featured API, because it's an obvious way to ignore ads (and maintaining the API costs you money).
API isn't free.
It never has been free, but they string along developers for as long as it's convenient and then turn against them. It's a pretty obvious pattern, yet devs fall for it every time.
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?
I've been also thinking this. They should have a tier for users that want to use 3rd-party integrations, and/or a tier for people who want to create such things. Strava could also do something like this. However, both companies have been going the other way and crippling their existing free APIs, and then suffering user backlash. It's almost like it's a bad idea to remove features... Who'd have thought.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Strava/comments/1gv4dob/strava_anno...
Price gouging is using price changes to gouge you. The prices could get jacked up, but not gouged.
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.
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
Musk did it to decrease transparency, because bot hunting and similar research was enabled by the API.
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.
I live in Spain, so it suggests Spanish podcasts to me, even though I only listen to podcasts in English or Catalan.
Music the same, I mostly listen to music in either Catalan or English, with a couple of Spanish songs in my lists. But lots of his suggestions are for music in Spanish. Heck, I just see that one of his recommendations is new things in Flamenco, even though it's a musical genre I haven't listened a single song of (nothing against it per se, only that I don't like it).
As I'm using it more to listen to podcasts now I find it hard to listen to music, because if I leave a podcast mid reproduction and play some music I have to remember which podcast it was, search for it, and then I can listen to the rest. Two separate modes, one for music, one for podcasts, would be good. Maybe a mixed one for people who do both mixed.
I will not add on how most of the music it suggests (when not suggesting things that I like) are things I already have in my lists, not good things that I could add to them.
It needs some work.
Psst sounds good, I'll try it, hopefully the API changes have not affected it.
Basically because we had the same gripes about Spotify's "one size fits all" approach ourselves and wanted to develop something better.
Can you explain how you use the recommendation feature? What does it mean to enable one of the checkboxes based on a certain song I like? Will it override the 'liveness' or 'danceability' of original song or emphasize that this aspect is particular important to match to the original song?
Two important things that psst needs to improve is reducing clicks when switching songs and showing album/song icons for each song.
Again, this is just anecdotal, will have to look at how psst does it to be a 100% sure.
Perhaps someone knowledgeable in Rust can help figure out this bug: https://github.com/jpochyla/psst/issues/348
Solid code base for early Rust contributions IMO.
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
https://github.com/jpochyla/psst/blob/69314f9fe8e86d57a678ab...
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.
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.
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.
Picard sets _all_ the metadata on the music and PlexAmp uses it to create playlists with the OpenAI API.
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.
This seems like pretty low bar.
Iiuc this is just about APIs for the recommendation engine
It’s never been easier to generate recommendations (eg via LLMs and other routes)
The core functionality otherwise remains unchanged in the API
LLMs require data, as I'm sure you know. This is locking up what was previously an interesting source of data, which undermines your argument over the long term
I honestly don't find Spotify's recommendations all that great. I definitely experienced a broadening (perhaps deepening) of my listening early on, but my experience has been that the recommendations are pretty shallow.
I find after throwing together a playlist with some stuff I like, it'll add a few more artists to my mental roster, then nothing. I'll get thrown around in the same loop with the same tunes and artists -- usually from the more famous albums.
I don't want to sound too much like the grouchy aging hipster that I am, but recommendations engines are just one of many ways of discovering music, and I feel like y'know, the old ways were better than just paying some company to do it for me. I'm talking here about being a regular on a local music scene, smoking weed with musicians, trading MP3s on the sneakernet.
Another thing where we just pay some money for "convenience", but are left with some hollow and empty algorithmic imitation of something we once loved.
Your LLM suggestion made me do a little sick in my mouth.
Just what I want in a recommendation engine - to sift through garbage nonsense.
e.g. mine are in a well backed up filesystem, reachable from anywhere in the world via my tailscale network.
Typically mounted read-only on whatever computer I am using, at definitely less than $12/mo.
In contrast, Spotify doesn't even have much of the music I listen to.
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
That way, you can have the information you need w/o being tracked.
> Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.
- 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.
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.
You’ll need to convert FLAC to ALAC with e.g. ffmpeg or XLD, and cloud files played on other devices will be converted to AAC, but it works really well overall.
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.)
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.
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.
DRM, yeah okay, valid reason.
People who want to do stuff like making custom apps or scripts that use these APIs should instead be building their own music servers.
Damn straight! https://blog.metabrainz.org/2024/11/28/pissed-off-by-spotify...
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Any guesses if this includes New Releases and Discover Weekly playlists?
Jlarome, if you read that, publish the code. PLEASE !!!
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
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.
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 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#acce...).
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-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-employ...
This might be the push I needed.
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.
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.
I hope they will long live
What a bullshit... this is an abuse of the language.
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.
