Spotify will no longer allow developers who build third-party apps using its Web API to access some features within its music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company said in a developer statement on Wednesday. Announced in a blog post. The company appears to be restricting third-party developers from using data from Spotify listeners to build AI apps.
“We are making changes to our public API as part of our ongoing efforts to address the security challenges that many companies currently face,” a Spotify spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. .
This change is intended to restrict certain developers who we believe are abusing our APIs, including by scraping data from the platform. Features that Spotify disables access to can reveal information about the listening habits of Spotify's user base, such as the artists and songs that different listener groups often listen to. These could be used to create competitive AI music recommendation models, which Spotify itself has been developing in recent years.
Developers are losing access to Spotify's song and artist recommendations, as well as Spotify's audio analytics that describe a track's structure and rhythm. Developers also no longer have access to audio features that reference various characteristics of a song, such as its “danceability,” energy, and whether or not it's acoustic. Spotify also blocked access to developers who use algorithmically created playlists.
On Spotify's community forums, several people expressed anger that the music platform had revoked access to these features. Some developers were using these features to create AI music recommendation services, while others were building apps unrelated to AI recommendations; You will no longer be able to access it as well.
“With the advent of Transformer models, there is probably a risk that people will train new models to emulate Spotify's model,” said one developer on the forum. “I really hope that's not the reason they're removing it, but it would be a real shame if that was the case.”
“Let's be real here: This is not about security or user privacy. This is about the data used to train AI models,” said another developer.
Spotify has been working on building AI music models in recent years, and CEO Daniel Ek has previously said that he believes AI will be a “huge creative force” in music. Spotify has released several AI products based on these models in recent years, including last year's AI DJ. The company has also rolled out AI playlists to more users in the US, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand in recent months.
These changes only affect developers who have more limited API access than official Spotify partners. Developers who previously submitted extensions can still use these API endpoints, but Spotify doesn't seem to have alerted developers that these changes were coming.