Quota and Scope Extension Request

[Harris01]

Hello Spotify Developers, 

I am a researcher at the University of Southampton working on a web application for conducting an academic survey on novel music recommendation interfaces. 

The application will be collecting the saved songs from a user’s Spotify account and will give the user relevant song recommendations based on their saved songs. We will delete all the collected data other than recommendations and the users’ ratings of these recommendations after the end of the survey. All stored data will be fully anonymized, and the use of the data will be clearly explained to users before they consent to take part. 

We have already submitted two requests for extending our quota, so that we can run the application with more than 25 users, and we were rejected both times. The feedback we received was the following: 

"You must not analyze the Spotify Content or the Spotify Service for any purpose, including without limitation, benchmarking, functionality, usage statistics, or user metrics."  

We are a bit surprised by this, as this is a purely non-commercial academic study, and there are precedents of the Spotify API being used for similar such studies, e.g., in these papers: https://psyarxiv.com/4ftb7/ and https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3209219.3209223  

If anyone could give us any further feedback on what might be the issue or how we could go about using the Spotify API for academic research, it would be much appreciated. 

Thanks in advance.