Spotify’s Unrealistic and Counterproductive Demands from Developers

[alpistos]

Hello,
I have been requesting a quota increase for my application for the past year, and it has been rejected ten times. The latest rejection reasons are not only irrelevant to my app’s actual functionality but also highlight a deeply flawed approval process.

Now, I am told that I cannot even request a quota increase unless my application already has at least 250,000 monthly active users. This is an unrealistic requirement—my app is entirely dependent on Spotify’s API, and without the quota increase, I cannot even reach 26 users. Expecting developers to achieve such a massive user base before granting the tools required to scale is illogical and counterproductive.

My application is a social media platform where people match with others listening to the same song and chat in real time. The stated reason for rejection was:

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

This reasoning simply does not apply. My app never stores or analyzes any Spotify statistics whatsoever. The only database table I have is users, which contains basic login information—everything else happens in real time through Spotify’s API (such as sending chat messages).

I invested months of development into this project under the terms and conditions that were in place at the time, only for the rules to change and render my efforts useless. This is discouraging and feels unfair. If Apple Music or YouTube Music offered comparable API capabilities, I would not hesitate to migrate my app there immediately.

I urge Spotify to reconsider my application. If no one here can directly assist me, please provide me with the contact information of the decision-makers so that I can explain to them how flawed and damaging this process has been.

[stuxmirai]

Spotify just doesn't want to say the quiet part out loud. They don't care about small devs and don't want to put effort towards fostering a developer community. Hopefully that changes, but for now we've basically been told to beat it.

[alpistos]

Frankly, I don’t care what they think. I’ve sacrificed countless nights for an app, and in return, they rejected it 10 times over a feature that has never existed in my app. The reason, as you said, is obvious—they simply don’t want small developers.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less. If they keep doing this, I’ll continue to pursue my rights through legal means. If I had invested this effort into another app, I would have already been successful by now. With just a tiny decision, they managed to turn an app that can’t be used in any other way into trash. Is this what they call fair?

[stuxmirai]

I'm not sure what rights you're talking about. Spotify is a private service, they don't 'have' to do or accomodate anything. Its not fair at all, but regardless of how hypocritical and unopen they are, they have the right to do so. 

Hopefully they approve you or walk back these changes someday though