Changes to Web API

[Loneliest_Cabin]

Folks, some news on changes to the web API has been posted on the Spotify For Developers blog.

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. As such we have recently made some important changes related to access to some of our endpoints and functionality. You can read the details on the blog: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2024-11-27-changes-to-the-web-api

We are here to listen to any feedback you may have. 

[holamau]

does Apple Music have an API like this tho? Honest question

[holamau]

Oh, looks like they do. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi

[brunobastosg]

I have a personal app (it's not even an app, it's a weekly job) that downloads the the "Discover Weekly" playlist and saves it to the cloud (for future data analysis, just for myself). Now it doesn't work anymore.

[YungNelson]

Would you like to be credited for this?

[holamau]

@yunnancharm... they won't care, unfortunately 

Just check out the loud silence in this thread... nothing from their community reps.  

[craftedsounds]

pretty bummed tbh. had a nice integration on our site to pull related artists and continue discovery beyond artists on our label, but I guess we'll look elsewhere to do something like that. 

[RobyBoss]

I was about to finish my biggest project yet, now everything I did is gone. I hope you ll solve the issues and bring the endpoints back.

[Herobrine2084]

It's been a week since the API was removed without any prior notice (breaking countless third-party apps relying on Spotify without consideration).

When will we get a replacement? Will we get anything at all, or should we move on to another music provider?

[jpzp2001]

Sad to hear the bad news. As many others I found my app not working properly out of nowhere and was blindsided by this update. There is a lot of creative people and amazing projects that will be hindered because of this change. Although I understand the risk the stakeholders are trying to avoid, because from a business standpoint that will always be their priority. I hope you find a way to restore the APIs functionality as it was before, maybe adding a more rigorous process for obtaining developer credentials or adding more limitations. I think we all can get through a little more paperwork if we get our projects back.

[offbeatmammal]

If it helps, both MusicBrainz and LastFM have pretty robust related artists, and related tracks in their API (spent the last couple of days comparing them and replacing Spotify). 

[k_shatz]

@offbeatmammal

Have you found any replacements for BPM and Key of songs? Also, how has your luck with musicbrainz and lastfm been in terms of data completeness. Testing 500 of my own songs there was 40% songs that those two sources are missing.

[offbeatmammal]

BPM/Key - sadly both MusicStax and SongBPM both rely on Spotify APIs (still working, but as they don't have an API you'd have to screen-scrape which is probably a ToS violation)

Completeness - for commercial/mainstream content over about the last 10 years LastFM has been pretty good (actually checking stats, I've been using LastFM for about 15 years), but less popular content does rely on crowd sourcing to be the first to submit

[k_shatz]

@offbeatmammal

Yeah, I've found numerous websites that still have access to the API and considered web scrapping, but like you said could be a ToS violation, and would just be a UX nightmare unless I do lots of cacheing, which then becomes a financial issue. 

I was mainly building in the EDM scene, and just too many tracks are missing. Might just have to hang up the cleats on this one and walk away sadly...

[Neumann_]

This is very sad news...
Could you at least make sure the plalists generated by Spotify don't appear in the /playlists endpoint ? Right now we get 'null' elements for these playlists in the middle of the other playlists. Ridiculous.

[DisappointedUser1]

Wonder when we hear something from Spotify about this? 
I've personally stopped all development, until we see if they really mean this.

[Karnay]

I still searching for a good replacement right now. Most apis I saw did not fit all my needs. For my small app I need danceability, BPM, title, artist and if possible tact.

Has anyone a option I should look up again? Because just few have something like danceability..

Thx if someone has a solution for me 

[trapstar324]

"I’ve been working on an app for the past few months that heavily relied on these APIs. The goal was to help users build playlists by discovering great tracks, creating queues, and pushing them to Spotify as playlists—essentially catering to DJ-like super-users.

It’s incredibly frustrating that this change happened while I was in the middle of coding, and now my entire app is essentially broken. A heads-up or some prior notice would have been really helpful, as I’m now left scrambling with no alternatives for the kind of data that Spotify provides. This feels like a significant setback, and it’s disheartening to see all the work from the last few months come to an abrupt halt.

Really disappointing. 🙏"

[squirreltoken]

If only we could know if we get a replacement or I can just switch to apple right now. Would show some respect. 

[lollilol01]

its their data but it affects us all

[shangoba]

I cannot believe this... You guys just killed the best feature of Spotify...

Just like many others, I can no longer populate my personal playlists with API. This is extremely sad.

As one of the heaviest users of this app, it is very difficult and time consuming to navigate recommendations in the user interface. I have to click hundreds of times to create a playlist from the featured albums. There isn't enough recommendations and it also shows the same albums again and again. It is way easier to just use the Get Recommendations endpoint. This is the main feature that keeps me a Spotify user. You guys are alienating your most active users by deprecating this endpoint. Which company does this?

I understand the concerns around competitors using this endpoint but I believe you guys can easily add reasonable limitations instead of deprecating the endpoint entirely...