Spotify will no longer allow developers who build third-party apps using its API to access several of the platform's features, such as song and artist recommendations. The company appears to be restricting third-party developers from building AI apps using Spotify's listener data.
Spotify will no longer allow developers who build third-party apps using its API to access several of the platform's features, such as song and artist recommendations. The company appears to be restricting third-party developers from building AI apps using Spotify's listener data.
"As part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges many companies face today, we're making changes to our public APIs," a Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email.
The changes are aimed at restricting certain developers that the company believes have been abusing the API, including by harvesting data from the platform. Features that Spotify disables may reveal information about Spotify users' listening habits. They can be used to build competitive AI music recommendation models that Spotify itself has been developing in recent years.
In addition to Spotify's recommendations for songs and artists, developers lose access to Spotify's audio analysis, which describes the structure and rhythm of a track. The developers also lost access to audio features that refer to various characteristics of a song, including its "danceability," energy, and whether it's acoustic. Spotify has also restricted developers from using its algorithmically generated playlists.
On Spotify's community forum, several people expressed outrage that the music platform has removed access to these features. While some developers have used these features to create AI music recommendation services, others have created apps that have nothing to do with that, but they will now lose access anyway.
"With transformer models, there's probably a risk that people will train new models to mimic Spotify models," one developer said on the forum. "I really hope that's not the reason they're closing it, but if it is, I'm just disappointed."
"Let's be real, it's not about user security or privacy, it's about the data used to train AI models," said another developer.
