Because I don't disagree with that premise at all but am forced to play by these bullshit rules? I wish I didn't have to, but if I want my website to exist and continue to have any sort of audience, I have to play by those bullshit rules. The alternative to no API access isn't "more decentralisation", the alternative is absolutely no human curation what so ever, as that process tends to require some sort of API-powered tools to wade through the (nowadays >30% AI-generated) noise.

Here's like the dumbest use case: say you have a hundred artists you wanted to follow and be notified whenever they release any new music, without any of it slipping through the cracks because of "the algorithm" and without any sort of preference towards the most mainstream subset of those 100 artists. Once you already have an established brand and have crossed some sort of an arbitrary, almost always non-transparent threshold of clout, there are dozens of ways for you to do that. Hell, Apple will reach out to pay you to plug into their API and use their embed above everyone else's. But while you're a nobody, even this trivial use case from a technical perspective is made virtually impossible because you can't get access to any sort of API to simply plug into.

Anyways, not much of a problem to me any more as I can easily prove my side project reaches a six figure amount of people every month with no advertising, but I promise you it would be a problem to you if you ever decided to try build anything even remotely music-related.