Spotify has vaguely attributed the need for the API changes to improving security:
- In its blog post, Spotify says that it rolled out the changes with “the aim of creating a more secure platform.”
- In a community forum post, a Spotify employee says that “we want to reiterate the main message from the blog that we’re committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all Spotify stakeholders.” The post has many pages of replies from frustrated developers.
- In a statement to The Verge, Spotify spokesperson Brittney Le Roy says that “as part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs.”
This is fairly disingenuous. The affected endpoints are all GET requests, which are read-only requests that provide some data about the track/artist/playlist/etc. There isn’t really very much potential to do anything insecure here.
The only thing they’re securing is their hegemony.
Reddit all over again.
Yes! Good. Hopefully this pushes more people off their platform to decentralized alternatives.
For recommendations and discovery (which was a large part of what kept me with Spotify), I’m a big fan of https://listenbrainz.org/ In the time I’ve been using it, the recommendations have gotten way better, and I appreciate their efforts towards transparency. (Yay for open source)
You can import listen data from music streaming services, so if anyone is curious, I’d recommend setting it up and seeing how it goes; I only recently got round to cancelling my Spotify, but before then, I had it set up so my Spotify listens would show up on my listenbrainz.
You’re quite right though that there aren’t any straightforward replacements for Spotify. Personally, I’m returning to the seven seas, which is why I’m so appreciative of listenbrainz — that discovery stuff really was the last big thing chaining me to Spotify
Please don’t break Toastify again. Please…
