> 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.
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.
People who want to do stuff like making custom apps or scripts that use these APIs should instead be building their own music servers.
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!
I think this is also why you see bands like Weezer releasing more niche EPs/LPs. Heck, look at jam bands like Phish or Dave Matthews who release every single live show online as a separate album for fans to also buy to relive the experience they had at a particular show. The hardcore fans will buy the music, so it's in the band's best interest to "keep shipping" and record as much as possible.
Imagine a band with four or five members doing a 20 date tour in 1000 cap venues where tickets are $40 each. Maths looks good, right? $40,000 a night! $800k for the tour, and then you can sell a bunch of merch an easily make $1 million. Great!
No.
A touring band might sell out every night of the tour but more likely it’s going to be 70-80% occupancy. So let’s call it 75%. Suddenly that $800k drops to $600k.
But then you need to pay the venue/promoter a big chunk of that. Depending on what the promoter is providing that could be as much as 40-50%
Let’s go with a conservative 40%.
You’re down to $360k now.
But you’ve still got to pay all the costs of the tour.
A 20 date tour probably means 25 days on the road, at least.
A tour bus that could fit 4 or 5 people plus tour manager (yes, you need one) and a tech/roadie/sound engineer to get the set up right in each venue (let’s say you’ve got one person who can do all of this) is going to cost $1500 a day for the vehicle. Add in mileage, which is often about $5+ per mile. So that 20 date tour with 25 days on the road, and 4000 miles (coast to coast) will cost you maybe $57.5k for the tour bus and driver and mileage. (Gas, insurance etc are covered by the per mile charges that tour bus operators charge). You’re going to need to park the tour bus during the day. That’s maybe $200 a day. More in some cities.
You’re down to $300k now.
But wait - no one has been paid yet!
The tour manager will easily cost $450 per day or more - and there will be days require for planning (“advancing”) the tour and wrap up days. So the 25 date tour might need 5 days advancing and two days post-tour admin. That’s $14400, so call it $15k.
Your technician will cost about the same. Maybe less, but you want someone who can do three things, so let’s call your manager plus tech/sound engineer $30k.
We are down to $240k now.
At this point it’s worth mentioning that the artist’s manager and billing agent commission on the “gross” - the entire amount the artist gets before costs - the $360k fee from tickets after the promoter’s share. Those commissions are typically 20% to manager and 15% to agent. So we need to deduct another $126k.
That gives $114k left.
None of the band members have been paid yet.
But, also, they need a support act for each show. If each support act gets $500 then that’s another $10k gone. $104k left.
Everyone needs a per diem! 7 people on the road, plus driver. They all need coffees, water, laundry, dry cleaning, gym passes, cough medicine, whatever, plus a “buy-out” for meals. So let’s make sure everyone has $60 a day for the buy-out and another $20 for incidentals. $16k. $88k left.
The tour - and all the gear - hasn’t been insured yet, and the band and crew don’t have insurance for medical emergencies while touring. Let’s say that’s going to cost another $3k total.
And then everyone needs flights and cabs at the end of the tour to get home. They’ll have excess luggage and instruments. So let’s call that $1500 each. Another $10k.
That’s means there’s $75k left.
The band needs to rehearse and build their live show. So that’s probably a couple of weeks rehearsal, planning, etc. So that’s a 40 day commitment.
Five people, 40 days, $75k. Each band member walks away with $15k - or $375 a day.
But how often are you going be doing a tour of that scale? Once a year probably. And touring is gruelling.
If you’re playing bigger venues with higher ticket prices there is more money - but costs can also scale.
To make $75k from bandcamp you need to sell maybe 10,000 $10 albums.
To make $75k from streaming you’d need maybe 18-20 million streams.
And you can do that without the crippling costs of touring.
Sure, if you’re on a label you’re going to get a lot less.
But touring isn’t a magic money tree, and it’s hard work.
Have you ever heard of Direct Hit!? I think they squarely fit in the mid-level or below.
2. The band sold a total of $4k in tickets. If tickets were $10 then that’s 400 tickets. So roughly 10 people per show.
3. They apparently own their own van.
4. They slept on people’s floors and couches.
5. They apparently didn’t eat or drink.
6. They didn’t insure the tour or their gear.
7. There was no contingency for emergencies.
8. They presumably booked the tour themselves and self manage (which might explain why they are playing to ten people at a time)
9. According to Wikipedia the band has five members.
10. Their 37 day tour grossed $8598 with costs of $3096.
And still, their take for the tour was $5502. For a 37 day tour. For a band with five members.
That’s a grand total of $30 a day.
So in reality this tour cost them whatever their daily living costs are, less $30.
I don’t know what living costs are like in Milwaukee - nor what they were like in 2014 - but let’s assume that the band members are all single and happy to live a relatively basic life and need $30,000 each per year to cover their costs.
That’s $82 a day each. So between them to survive 37 days they need a total of $15170
So they lost $10k on this tour.
They would have been better off giving 1000 people $10 to buy their album on bandcamp.
Also the assumption you can get one guy to do lighting and sound is pretty unrealistic unless your show consists of a static wash throughout the entire show. Theatrical shows you can get away with it, but that's usually because the man hours are heavily front loaded into pre-production, but with live music you will need a dedicated LX Tech and a dedicated Sound Engineer.
I moonlight as a lighting technician during the evenings and weekends, mainly working in handful small local venues, there's me running lighting and the sound engineer doing his thing. The bands playing are easily spending £300 a night just on 2 people (And this is a small venue probably about 200 cap in the main hall), youd be spending much more for a touring crew
Quite likely an artist of this scale would not even break even touring and would hope (ha!) to make up the difference on merch. But of course merchandise is not pure profit, you have to lug it around on the road, and it’s a sunk cost that requires upfront investment.
But my main point was to counter the fallacy that artists make loads of money from touring. People with no experience of the music industry don’t understand the promoter/artist split or the agent and magnet commissions. They realise that probably the artist isn’t getting 100% of the ticket sales but they don’t realise that their share - before their costs - might only be 35-40%.
True but—
Also going to remain the case as long as customers refuse to pay for things they appreciate
Damn straight! https://blog.metabrainz.org/2024/11/28/pissed-off-by-spotify...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ba0ggi/...
> 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.
What would be the non-stupid amount for Snoop Dogg to make off it?
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
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.
Maybe you have ondansetron around
So happy I never got started on that little dream project that’s been knocking around the back of my head for a couple years…
You know how people believe whatever they read, hear, and watch even though it might not be true? Well an LLM is something people read and to get over the hurdle of whether something might be true or good, you simply embrace it and ignore that it could ever be wrong. I don’t get it either as I get upset when I find out a source is mostly wrong.
As far as I can tell, the only thing actually any good at music recommendation is (some) humans.
I'm pretty sure it's not LLM based though, but rather domain specific, or possibly just a simple recommendation engine ("people who like x also often enjoy y").
This is in stark contrast to Spotify, where after a while it would invariably throw in some songs that just did not fit in at all with the rest, and it made for a jarring experience. I've never really had that happen with Apple Music.
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
Just what I want in a recommendation engine - to sift through garbage nonsense.
This seems like pretty low bar.
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.
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
Always has been (meme)
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?
Where did I put them? I just had stacks of them like everyone else. Now, they are just in boxes labeled CDs. Most of the time, they were in a CD player in the car, in the disc changers, in the Walkman, etc. Lots of people would toss the case, and put the disc/liners in a flip book to reduce space.
When you are into music, you deal with it. Like drummers. Where would you even put the drum set? What a silly question honestly.
I tried to compare the sub fee with how many CDs you would end up with.
Judging by my parents and friends parents about 40-80 CDs seemed like a common size of the music collection among people that had a collection, that propably had been growing for 20 years since mid 80s.
I also argue that video rental stores were way more value than todays streaming subscription.
That's £20 per month for 8 movies? Not sure that's better value than Netflix.
CDs were 20-30 euro. A complete fucking rip off. No highschool kid could afford buying one every week unless they had wealthy parents. DVD box sets of TV shows? Just thinking about it makes my blood boil so I'll leave it there.
I for one welcome our Netflix and Spotify overlords.
Once I got into electronic music, things did get a bit more expensive because of the damn "import" stickers coming out of Europe.
They aren't profitable.
It doesn't matter if its 70 or 99.99%.
Once you are famous you can go on festivals. That's how streaming works in my country. When enough people know your songs you can get 5k people to show up at your live gig.
It sucks for the autistic artists who want to make music in his basement I guess.
Though historically when Spotify has come close to making a profit, record labels see it as an opportunity to demand more or pull out.
This is why any touring band asks you to buy merch, they eat on the money from merch
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.
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.
People are staying on Spotify just because of inertia and because "everyone" is there, not because it's the best at anything any more.
UI quality is a subjective thing.
According to 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).
Other than that my point was how incomplete it is and always was. It could be nice as additional catalogue to my music, but for me it's missing to many of my favourite songs to use it as main driver.
Edit:// in Switzerland downloading music for private use is no crime. So the initial situation was different I guess.
And they didn't start with illegal MP3s. They did have an ad-supported free tier from the start though. But it was not illegal. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
I think it's napster you're thinking of. That was an illegal sharing platform and now a mediocre paid service.
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4136/Spotify-TeardownInsid...
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.
The pot splitting model Spotify uses is definitely not good but the major labels are the ones with all the power, without pot splitting they wouldn't accept licencing to Spotify because they would make less money.
At every filthy corner of the music industry you'll find a very sore spot: the big 4 labels control this industry. From fucking with artists where contracts requiring artists to pay back all "marketing and fees" before any royalties are distributed, royalties split usually 80:20 or 70:30 for label:artist, forcing artists to make their songs viral before they can be released (without much marketing support from the labels, the only reason they exist).
It's a passion industry, and just like any other passion industry it's fraught with exploitation. Just look at game development, underpaid, overworked, because there's always someone else with passion to make a game.
Also they don't technically pay artists aside from the self-released ones, most artists with bigger payouts aren't self-released so Apple Music just like Spotify is filling major labels coffers more than the artists' pockets
That's all relevant on the comparison of why Apple Music can pay more than Spotify, unsure what you didn't get but willing to clarify.
No evidence of this and it doesn't even make sense.
EU would have a field day with it and Apple likes making money wherever it can find it.
How doesn't it make sense? Apple Music has fewer paying subscribers than Spotify, Apple Music prices just like Spotify's prices vary per market, Spotify pays out 70% of revenue to royalties but Apple Music is able to pay much more per stream even though it has fewer subscribers.
Now think: where does the money to cover Apple Music paying royalties comes from? If they pay double what Spotify pay and Spotify is spending 70% of revenue on royalties, how can Apple Music pay double without costing double? Something has to cover, Apple Music is a loss leader product.
> EU would have a field day with it and Apple likes making money wherever it can find it.
Apple is making money through its aggregated services (iCloud + TV+ + Apple Music), if Apple Music is a loss leader but makes people contract the bundle which is a money maker for Apple, they will lose money on Music.
Because streaming platform do not pay per stream making pay per stream a meaningless metric.
Spotify has ~half of its users using the free tier (with ads) and the other half are subscribers. On average a subscriber generates waaaaay more revenue than free users ( this is visible in Spotify's financial results). Apple does not have a "free" version. If Spotify were to simply abandon their free version and became paying subscribers only like Apple, pay per stream would almost double but at the end of the month, artists (and Spotify) would get less money. Which is preferable ? More money at the end of the month or higher pay-per-stream ?
On top of that music streaming is very seasonal (total music consumption varies by month) so pay-per-stream is not even a stable metric.
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.
$19.80 goes to one artist, and $0.20 to the other. 99:1.
edit: Maybe what you're getting at is that the person who listened to only one song should pay 99x less. Then it really would be pay-per-play. But Spotify is a subscription service. What else should they do with my extra $9.90? Send it all to the one artist? That would be interesting... but then what if I don't listen to any songs in the month? Bank it and send it to the spread for the following month?
So, it's like 99:1 ratio, but 99 side is Lady Gaga and friends, and 1 is all the indies and niche artist around the world together.
Before streaming with pro-rata royalties, when you bought a record, some money went to the artist of the record (after distribution cuts etc).
Of course Spotify doesn't care. They have to give up 70% of their revenue anyway. But the distribution of this money is the important part and of course pro-rata benefits big labels who have control over the catalog on Spotify and are shareholders.
I refuse to use anything Apple out of principle.
Slightly lower price for the same catalog size.
For Spotify, which I’ve been a paid subscriber from basically day one, the UI went downhill from incredibly great (I do have fond memories of the first client in Qt) to a total mess without any consistency.
Tidal is just a stagnant mess. Apple Music is not better.
I guess we are just suffering from the fact that UI are not made anymore to be useful but to influence customers behaviors.
I would assume that people with 'principles' would not use any of these subscription companies.
He's very knowledgable about music, great interviewer and seems to be in his element.
Once you've tried it there's no turning back.
People have been begging for that for ages on Spotify’s forum…
Seems like Apple pays 3x what Spotify pays? It can't be as simple as that though.
All they are really doing is using VC money to pay artists a lil bit more to seem more enticing.
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.
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.
You mean labels and distributors, the money goes through a lot of people before the artists see any of it.
I'd switch to Apple in a heartbeat if it had a good client for Linux.
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.
I like each for its own reasons, though if I had to choose one forever, I’d probably pick Apple, but it wouldn’t be by a landslide. :)
Would be cool if I import my detailed listening data from Spotify into Apple Music and basically pre-train their recommendations for me to conclude if it’s better/worse than Spotify’s.
Apple Music UI is atrocious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
https://companiesmarketcap.com/spotify/marketcap/
One would think Spotify’s potential is capped by their expenses (in the hands of the music owners - Universal/Warner/Sony), and the pricing of their competitors, with the deepest pockets in the world (Apple/Alphabet/Amazon).
A biased algorithm gives them increasing power over time.
They have a profit for first three quarters of 2024, and maybe they will continue to eke out a small profit margin, but I’m not seeing what the play is for its current market cap.
People disagree. Spotify more than twice as many subscribers as the next most popular service. That’s not some stable equilibrium.
That “small” profit is already 1b/year and the quarterly profit has been increasing rapidly. Suggesting it’s only possible that that number will maintain exactly the same or less is just an assumption on your part. The market disagrees.
The CEO of Warner Music Group - the smallest of the three majors - Robert Kyncl, ex-YouTube exec, said on the company’s most recent earnings call that he believes the penetration of cable TV and SVOD is a good indicator of streaming’s potential, and currently subscription music streaming is lagging behind.
There is explosive growth in some countries that were until recently delivering little: for example something like 95% of Brazil’s recorded music revenue comes from streaming. That’s happened in a pretty short period of time.
There are currently fewer than 1 billion paying streaming subscribers across all platforms globally, but 1 billion is close. It will have taken around 18 years to reach 1 billion paying subscribers; I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit 2 billion in a third of that time. So by 2030 or shortly afterward there may be 2 billion paying subscribers and it’s likely that Spotify will continue to have the lion’s share of those.
It has deep relationships with the major labels and can use high value subscribers in developed territories to subsidise adoption in developing makers.
According to Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, in the US and some major European markets the company has significantly pulled back on marketing spend, but that hasn’t really harmed acquisition - plus a lot of consumers are going from account creation to paid subscription without converting through ad-supported.
Penetration in the biggest markets is still well under 50% of the population - around 30% to 35% - compared to 50% penetration for cable TV and SVOD.
I agree that the valuation seems detached from reality - but the last three quarters have helped build people’s expectations, and the share price has gone from around $170 a year ago to $450+ more recently.
Whether it can sustain that remains to be seen, it’s a crazy multiple, but the relationships Spotify has with the major labels give it a most that makes it hard for new regional competitors to launch, and its overall offering - and marketing clout - makes it hard for established regional competitors to compete effectively.
I doubt Spotify investors will be happy with 1% profit margins.
Dunno how you can be expected to build a business that surfaces the objective best content when your hands are tied giving away that much.
But then I'm old enough, pre internet, to also remember the days when people used to send each other mixtapes or you'd go round someone's house with a small selection of vinyl you'd play to each other.
And then there was the more recent (pre lockdown) era of going to see live bands and discovering new bands via the bands that were supporting or via conversations with other people at those gigs, who if you saw them enough times became your mates etc.
Nowadays I can spin up a program to generate a playlist of everyone playing the Great Escape or Glastonbury (assuming they haven't boycotted spotify) and listen to all of them before I even get there and because of the number of acts, given slightly different tastes, unless I make an effort I might not even see my mates....
I think that secretly most people don't want to discover new music they want to listen to what other people are listening. That's why labels are still in business.
They want nostalgia. They don't want cognitive load, they want enjoyment with no strings and no effort.
Musical taste just seems to stop developing somewhere in your 20s or 30s.
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.
If you have a Spanish emo rock band and want similar Spanish emo rock bands then you are mostly out of luck unless there are so many of those that Spotify considers them their own category. Most likely you are going to get just Spanish popular artists if the category is small enough.
I think their embedding vector for musical styles is just way, way too small.
Google, Spotify, PayPal and others all seem convinced, no matter what I do, that because my IP address is in Japan that I should be shown Japanese language.
On the iOS app it's "User"->Settings->Distance Units (I assume Android is similar).
(And if you want to adjust Apple Maps in metric, it is a bit more cryptic, it follows the general system settings app, in General->Language & Region->Measurement System, with a choice of Metric / US / UK).
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
https://github.com/jpochyla/psst/blob/69314f9fe8e86d57a678ab...
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.
What a bullshit... this is an abuse of the language.
The better comparison is PDF + OCR’d text VS Kindle.
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.
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.
Did you just decide on your 30th birthday that you aren't allowed to listen to new music anymore? I can't even imagine listening to the same music collection on repeat forever.
Me and you are both at least one to two standard deviations above the mean in terms of artist acquisition rates. And Spotify hasn’t been able to help me with music acquisition as much as exploring physical music selections or Discogs, BandCamp, or eBay has, and in those cases I end up with higher quality listening experience as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Any guesses if this includes New Releases and Discover Weekly playlists?
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...).
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.
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.
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-s...
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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?
Musk did it to decrease transparency, because bot hunting and similar research was enabled by the API.
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.
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.
I hope they will long live
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.
Jlarome, if you read that, publish the code. PLEASE !!!