Academic Inquiry: Machine Learning Policy regarding Personal Data Export & Audio Features

Leo13579 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 04:28:59 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Taiwan

Device

MacBook Air 2024

Operating System

MacOS14.6.1（23G93）

My Question or Issue

I am a student from Taiwan. I am writing to seek specific clarification regarding the use of Spotify data for an academic research paper involving human participants.

My research focuses on the predictive relationship between human emotions and music preferences. For this study, I plan to analyze a dataset combined from the following sources:

Participant Data: Listening histories obtained by research participants through their own "Download your data" tool (Privacy Settings), provided to this study with their explicit informed consent.
Technical Data: Audio Features (such as danceability, energy, etc.) obtained via the Spotify Web API to supplement the specific tracks within the participants' listening histories.

I understand that Spotify’s Developer Policy prohibits the use of Platform Content for training machine learning models. However, my inquiry concerns a non-commercial, academic study conducted under strict ethical guidelines:

Scope: The model will be trained solely on the listening patterns of consenting participants to predict emotional correlations. No data from the general Spotify user base will be harvested or involved.
API Usage: The Web API is used only to retrieve high-level acoustic attributes for tracks already present in the participants' provided histories.
Privacy & Ethics: This research has been designed to comply with data protection laws. All participant data will be fully de-identified, and no personal identifiers will be used in the machine learning model or the final paper.
Purpose: This is strictly for academic research and will not be used for any commercial applications or products.

Given that this research relies on data provided by individuals who have consented to share their own usage history for science, I would appreciate it if you could clarify if the "No Machine Learning" restriction applies to this specific academic use case.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Best regards,

Re: Academic Inquiry: Machine Learning Policy regarding Personal Data Export & Audio Features

Longway_Tian — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:46:11 GMT

Unfortunately, you are a little late. Spotify has stopped providing audio feature data since 2024.11.

topic Re: Academic Inquiry: Machine Learning Policy regarding Personal Data Export & Audio Features in Spotify for Developers

Academic Inquiry: Machine Learning Policy regarding Personal Data Export & Audio Features

Re: Academic Inquiry: Machine Learning Policy regarding Personal Data Export & Audio Features