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. 

[Bincvanburen]

Hi Spotify, I just finished my school project with the API. Tomorrow is my deadline and today everything disappeared because of this update. Can you please extend my app for a few more days. My exam is this Friday and I need to showcase my app.

Best regards,
Binc

[mikeve97]

Thank you Spotify, I will be cancelling my premium subscription... Great work!

[Lanyon12]

As a developer, it's disappointing, a lot of developers use your API, and this is a big update or major updates and you did not give us a beta tester. 🙂

[nickk1298]

Hours and hours of work gone, this is disappointing

[skysteve3]

Developers, if you're as annoyed as me, reach out to your favourite journalists/tech youtubers/podcasters etc. Post on twitter/threads/bluesky/whatever. The sad reality here is that most end users won't notice anything since existing apps continue to work. If you have users, have them post publicly too. To have any hope of Spotify reversing course here, there needs to be media coverage.

To be clear, I think the chances of any change is minimal, it's clear that Spotify's playlists/related artists/recommendations etc are a treasure trove for AI companies to scrape and re-sell. BUT if we have any hope of anything, there needs to be more than a few people begging for changes on a community forum.

[artemal007]

I’ve been working on an app that analyses playlists and generates new playlists based on audio features for more than a month. Suddenly it stopped working today and I’ve been troubleshooting for hours today trying to understand what’s wrong with my code since I’ve been getting 403 error. Only to find out later on that these crucial features for my project are being deprecated. That’s really unfortunate since this is my final project for Harvard course and now I have to rebuild another project from scratch. All the hard work gone for nothing…

I would really appreciate if Spotify provided access to these features for apps that were still in the development. 

[morrisMC]

@skysteve3 I think this could be one way to go forward, but i would rather suggest halting for a few days before summoning a sh*t storm. seeing what is possible with reasonable negotiation, and sounding out the room for meeting somewhere in the middle with spotify. Don't get me wrong i'm also kind of infuriated 🙂

[kaychamo]

I'm also owning a personal project to make some recommandations for myself, like your "monday weekly suggestions", but for my everyday listenings. Here we just lost all our ability to build around artists, genres, and recommendations... terrible day for discoveries around music. may you bring that back to us ❤️

[oguzhandere2]

Been working on a third party app of which i was using your apis for NEARLY 3 MONTHS. I was about to request quota extension in a few days. The app was taking input of how the user feels and create very personalized recommendations based on that. You should have given a heads up before deprecating these apis. You lost a lot of reliability from many developers', including me.

[Andr3icutrei]

I just finished yesterday my copy of the snake spotify game and today this happened. Today it does not work. Please reconsider this update.

[xVypar]

I made an app to get custom recommendations based on the user's selected tracks, artists or genres with many features like advanced details (audio features), quick previews etc. mainly because I wanted to learn a new framework and I really like Spotify. This little project of mine became really important to me and I just yesterday reached a point where I could use my own app and enjoyed it so much that I even asked my sister and friends for feedback and planned to ask for an extension. Today I was wondering why nothing works anymore, basically the core feature of my app is gone... I feel really annoyed. I have not even seen a warning about these changes.

[Lanyon12]

It's time to switch to apple music 

[nikoalex2005]

I literally paid hundeds of euros and spent hours upon hours coding to build my ultimate Spotify disco setup just to be spat on the face a month later. Why the h*ll are we revoked the possibility to access audio analysis APIs when these APIs are still available for vendors like Philips Hue?

Sorry for the negativity, but there was literally no heads up that these APIs would be disabled in the foreseeable future and no replacement for these APIs was provided. I'm now basically stuck with expensive e-waste and useless lines of code.

[mrjoker]

Just bring back the related artist endpoint men 🫣🫠. Now i just have to make a thousand more requests to get done what I want...

[tdambrin]

Hi,

Like many others, I just finished developing a Graph Visualizer heavily relying on these endpoints. It follow ToS since the beginning and luckily I pushed an extension request last week. As indicated in the blog post, this should still be under consideration. I really hope this doesn't get rejected without reason.
Pretty sure this is because people are building apps that don't follow ToS but there is a way to check that else than deprecating all endpoints of interests. This is killing 80% of the API at once without notice. I truly empathize with everyone that has spent hours and hours working on a cool project and might see all of this efforts lead to nothing. 

I am praying for my extension request but also think deprecating was not the right decision to make

[ImpalaOficial]

it has been broken since last week, maybe it's related

[Elbonec1337]

We were doing a project for a university with my groupmates that used these API. We have a deadline for the project tomorrow - we tested it yesterday and everything was ok. If I get expelled from the university - know that it's your responsibility.

[denayeisnotokay]

i am literally 4 days away from having to submit a final project for university that heavily depended on these features. thanks for just removing them with literally no notice, spotify! i will thoroughly enjoy spending my entire break trying to make up the points this move just lost me.

[0waify]

Hey Spotify Team,

I can't say I appreciate the decision to pull the plug on several important API endpoints me (and other developers) were using. Doing so without a foreboding warning is also insult to injury. I am sure the team is well aware of the consequences it can have on aspiring and freelancer developers that were passionate about the Spotify Web API.

I was working on a final project for my university's class, which utilized the recommendation and audio feature API. As I opened my program and spent hours debugging the "Error Code 403," I finally stumbled upon this forum post. This project has taken me the entire term and it is due next week. By removing access for apps in development mode for this feature, the Spotify Team has indirectly destroyed my project's functionality, as well as stripped me of a proper grade in the class. I will proceed to submit an extension request in hopes of gaining some level of functionality back before I fail the class. However, I am afraid my attempts will be futile, seeing how Spotify extension requests take on average more than a week to be approved (if my app even qualifies to be extended in the first place, of course).

It is a shame, as I am very passionate about Spotify and creating usable apps for others and have been using the API for years now. Aside from schoolwork, I was eager to continue building apps for me and Spotify users, as music is a big part of everyone's identity. My dream of building usable music apps is now being hindered because of these changes.

I do hope that the Spotify Team listens to everyone's frustration and takes their feedback into account. This seemingly sudden decision has affected our trust of Spotify's commitment to developers, as well as the reliability of the Spotify Web API itself. I hope you will take this feedback into consideration regarding decisions being made now and in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

[obiraaij]

Hello. I'd like to add to all those above me: I can not begin to describe the amount of anger and disappointment I feel towards Spotify for disabling this API out of the blue. Stakeholders above the passionate developers that have been working with your endpoints to give Spotify users and enthusiasts more features, sometimes even features you yourself would not think of building.

A heads up would've been nice. Not going through with this absolutely stupid decision would be better. I'm canceling my Spotify subscription, that's for sure.

Best,

A 7 years Spotify Dev user