Dear Spotify Team,
My name is Tim, I run GroupTube (https://group.tube), a website/app that allows users to spend time together, watch videos, listen to music, play games. Because it's more fun together with friends.
We have received well over 100+ individually written requests from our users, asking us to integrate Spotify. We'd be more than happy to do that. We already provide implementations for other services like YouTube, Twitch and Apple Music. GroupTube synchronizes playback between users, and allows them to create a shared playlist together. We also offer shared activities like games, and our users love listening to music while using them.
I have a few questions about whether your Terms allow integration of Spotify into GroupTube at all. To make this easy, I will outline the points that I believe are most critical below. I would be delighted to receive a response clarifying if GroupTube's use case clears or violates them.
Developer Policy III. 4.: "Do not create any product or service which includes any non-interactive internet webcasting service. For example, you can’t create an application which plays content from a single source to several simultaneous listeners."
Context: GroupTube would stream music on each user's devices individually, it would only keep playback in sync between them.
Developer Policy III. 6.: "Do not synchronize any sound recordings with any visual media, including any advertising, film, television program, slideshow, video, or similar content."
Context: GroupTube would never synchronize any sound recordings from Spotify with any other content from any other source. It would only keep the music from Spotify on sync between users.
Developer Policy III. 11.: "Do not build products or services that mimic, or replicate or attempt to replace a core user experience of Spotify or its group companies without our prior written permission. Your product or service must add independent value or functionality that improves users’ interactions with Spotify."
Context: GroupTube would offer a search feature and let the users see their library and playlists. We'd also build a shared queue, that can be edited by the group's members. To synchronize playback, we would use Spotify's Jam feature, but it does not seem to be available over API. Therefore we'd synchronize playback using the Web Playback API or the Embed iFrame API.
Developer Policy IV.: Streaming and Commercial Use
Context: GroupTube would never charge users for access to Spotify related features. Only the Spotify subscription would ever be required for a user to use these features. However we do plan on having a subscription model, that relates to other features on GroupTube, none of which make use of Spotify in any way.
Please feel free to visit GroupTube (https://group.tube) and get a sense of how this would look like yourself. We already offer implementations for other platforms (e.g. YouTube), which make it easy to understand how this could look like.
We'd love to get your feedback on this, as many of our users have specifically requested Spotify to be integrated. We hope you appreciate our interest in supporting Spotify.
Thank you for your help,
Tim Guggenmos
