Spotify revises TOS to allow transfers of user-created playlists | Hacker News Reader

Spotify revises TOS to allow transfers of user-created playlists

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546 pointsmortenjorck128 comments

I like to believe this person’s email thread is at least partly to thank — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371

Thank You for pointing this out. I was about to write a comment believing they reacted in Good Faith. Acting in line with their Time to Play Fair ( Against Apple App Store ) Campaign.

So it looks like actually has nothing to do with Good Faith. And people often tell me I am cynical, turns out I am still too naive.

Company that does things for profit does not operate in Good Faith. Especially if it facilitates the exit of clients.

If it wasn't for GDPR in Europe, they would fight this tooth and nail. I would not be surprised if they enable this ONLY for Europe, because they absolutely-have-to and ignore in other locations.

I am in EU, so I cannot test, I would like to ask someone from Africa, America(s), Asia, Oceania to let us know if this is also enabled/available in their country/regions.

All companies do things for profit, that's their primary raison d'être.

In this case, "profit" being an accurate euphemism for "avoid GDPR fines".

Keeping customers satisfied leads to a good name. A good name leads to more customers, and both that and satisfied customers leads to long term profit. It appears some companies focus too much on short term profit.

In this case shareholders and investors are the main customers, with short term profits keeping them happy, execs get good bonuses, more money is poured in from market/vc to keep the gravy flowing. No incentive for the deicision makers to keep the product users(sometimes called just the products) happy, for the giants atleast.

An accurate description of the toxicity of publicly owned companies, accelerated by VC and startup culture.

In this case, users are both product and paying customer. Ads is one thing, but GDPR request showed they log every action related to the account.

>Ads is one thing, but GDPR request showed they log every action related to the account.

People praise Spotify for how good their recommendations are, where do you think they get data for things like that?

Execs might get good bonuses in the short term, but may be left in the lurch over time. Global wealth and population has been rapidly increasing for a long time which has propped up a lot of terrible decisions.

Some people eat to live and some people live to eat.

And it is the same with companies. Some companies carry out their business in order to profit from it, and some companies generate profits in order to sustain their business.

Maybe for private companies, but public companies sole purpose is to generate profit. If they are not doing it to the best of their ability shareholders will replace the executive team.

And this is why I think public companies are a terrible model.

This is a myth. Stop perpetuating it.

https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

>Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors.

Your link agrees with me. If shareholders believe decisions are being made which lead to less profits leadership will be removed.

Your conclusion that the "sole purpose" is profit is erroneous. See sibling comment regarding Ben & Jerry's, for example.

Why then does Ben and Jerry's get involved in advocating for any number of political positions? (https://www.benjerry.com/values) They're a division of Unilever, a public company... an international conglomerate no less...

Certainly it can't be profit motive. Some of their positions would reduce profitability and alienating a substantial number of your potential customers can't be helpful for business either.

Maybe Unilever management or it's board are asleep at the wheel. Who knows, but there are plenty of counter-examples that demonstrate that no company is necessarily about financial profits alone. I'm pretty sure that investors know this, and invest for some of these non-financial motives as well... again, may not be the norm, but probably not rare for these companies either.

Ben and Jerrys is a luxury product. Being politically conscious is part of their brand and a reason they are able to charge high margins. They believe that differentiating themselves leads to long term profits. Critically, it's not just short term profits that are being maximizing. Creating a strong brand is the only way to ensure your product won't be undercut which is why firms are willing to engage in activities which build goodwill among their customers even if there are no immediately obvious profit motives. Political donations are part of Ben and Jerrys marketing budget.

What evidence do you have that such political activity is not intrinsically motivated?

The fact that every decision public companies make is done to maximize profits. If Ben and Jerrys didn't cultivate this image they'd just be another company selling overpriced ice cream. Instead I think it's fair to say they're an institution. That's not to say the people running B+J don't believe in the cause they're donating to, I'm sure they do, they just also believe it's good for business.

Google has had takeout for many, many years.

Takeout doesn't allow you to take your email directly from one service to the other.

Run a loop on all the takeout e-mail and send them to your new e-mail address, spoofing the headers for each e-mail?

If you do it yourself it's not service to service. You could have done that with the Spotify json takeout.

> If it wasn't for GDPR in Europe, they would fight this tooth and nail. I would not be surprised if they enable this ONLY for Europe, because they absolutely-have-to and ignore in other locations.

They have to follow GDPR everywhere in the universe except possibly the United States, because they are in an EU country.

GDPR applies if either the user is in the EU or the processor or controller is in the EU.

According to their site, Spotify service in the USA is supplied by Spotify USA, Inc. and Spotify service everywhere else is provided by Spotify AB, so I can’t tell if GDPR applies to US users of their service.

The CCPA in California is similar in thrust.

>And people often tell me I am cynical, turns out I am still too naive.

The final stage of cynicism is understanding that to fit in socially you have to indulge other people's desires for cute narratives over simpler and more roust explanations of behavior.

No you don’t. You just have to be better at delivering medicine.

c'mon mate, even a wisecrack that the lawyers made them do it can be enough to ruin flow and be a total buzzkill. Nobody wants to be the weird guy correcting banter.

Who said anything about correcting banter

Who is Good Faith?

I cannot upvote this person enough. Such clear expression, and insistence on their right. Love everything about this thread, even if we'll never know whether this was actually what made the difference.

<3 <3 <3

That entire email exchange is a thing of beauty.

Massive, massive gratitude and goodwill toward u/confiks. You, sir/madam, have executed a brilliant maneuver.

Thank you, original linker, for pointing this out.

I suppose it could act as inspiration for others to tackle other companies to task to provide personal data portability and simple integration with third parties.

I think it was key to the argument that the integration with third parties had previously worked.

Without that others could probably engineer a defense around technical infeasibility.

Wow! Big ups to Confiks, they achieved something great here. I'll be sure to emulate this in the future.

Really need to save this one for the future "GDPR is useless bureaucracy" naysayers. (Hi you, I know you're here reading this thread and mentally blocking this out already)

GDPR has created fertile grounds for the rights of users to their data. This is exactly the sort of interaction where laws are putting power in the hands of citizens they can use when companies either don't give a shit, or don't realize what they're doing is immoral.

I don't understand GDPR too well -- does this mean every company must build APIs that would be sufficient to allow competitors to import user data from them?

It does seem onerous. I wonder if, "so, we will email SongShift directly" etc., would do.

I guess the law doesn't say "for free" ? So perhaps they could charge a fee for each API use...

It otherwise seems unreasonable to require data-holders (/"controllers") to pay the costs of this "direct transfer", esp. re building and maintaining an API.

They have in their possession an object which the user owns -- their data -- would we, in analogous cases, require stores to do anything other than "hand it back" ?

This seems quite an odd law.

EDIT: given downvotes, let me clarify: I like the law. It is useful. I just want to understand the moral/legal/economic logic.

This law imposes costs somewhere, and prevents some services being offered.

> It otherwise seems unreasonable to require data-holders (/"controllers") to pay the costs of this "direct transfer", esp. re building and maintaining an API.

Consider it a cost of collecting the data in the first place.

You're assuming that they are deriving additional value from it. That isn't universal, but the law is.

Eg., consider me uploading some image files for processing and then downloading them. The website keeps those images only insofar as I wish, and never analyses them or derives value from them beyond what I permit -- and suppose the default is to permit nothing.

Then it seems odd. Since this is more like taking my shoes to be repaired. It would be onerous to require repair shops to send them elsehwere.

I think the theory is if the data controller does not derive value from storing the data they should not do so. In spotify's case they plainly do. Without user created playlists they would be up a creek.

If they get no value from it they're free to delete it

An alternative is to think of data as dangerous chemicals.

You can acquire it and store it, but you have to follow some procedures : - do not expose your employees to it - do not leak it in the environment

It then falls to the company to make the cost/benefit analysis : is this chemical important enough to our process to justify these hasles.

The data export also does not need to be a perfect API, dump a huge json and let third party handle changes.

I guess the relevant section also quoted in the original post by Confiks ("the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible") may be up for interpretation, and as a result not everyone might have provide such an API. But this specific case, we can be sure that it most definitely was technically feasible, as the feature used to work before their ToS change and it merely stopped working because they wanted to block SongShift.

You don't have to provide an API to transfer between accounts on the same platform, but you do need to provide a way to get all your data off the service, which another service can use to import.

read the emails this person sent to spotify.

The API was already implemented and shut off. He did not as them to implement the API, he asked them to turn it back on and there is a large difference.

Am I alone in thinking he isn't entirely correct? To my understanding with GDPR (I'm no expert, just on the developer end trying to adhere to it), he has all the right to get a copy of the data, as well as have that data be transferred to another controller.

He does, however have no say in the exact data transfer protocol used for the transfer. If Spotify wants to disable an api and shut down production resources, I don't see how a GDPR request can compel them otherwise. As long as they prepare all the data, and allow for the transfer, then they are complying with GDPR. Even if the API at some point existed, it doesn't mean they are required to maintain it.

The other side of this is that Spotify's answers were perhaps too earnest in detailing why. When arguing it is against their ToS, it doesn't really fly with GDPR anymore, because that implies they have everything in place, but they don't want to. They could have just said "we'll compile all the data and facilitate a transfer on your behalf", and the user really wouldn't have the slightest case.

So to sum up, my take is that both are wrong. Spotify in arguing its against their ToS (it doesn't fly). And the emailer arguing that they are entitled to Spotify enabling their api (they aren't).

Afaik GDPR says where it's technically feasible. The interpretation of technically feasible may vary, but given that the API was live for some time, it could be said it is feasible.

That being said I am no lawyer and I don't know what I'm talking about.

That is more or less why I wrote the things I wrote. By arguing it was against their ToS, they implied it was technically feasible. It however doesn't mean it isn't also technically infeasible, so I still believe Spotify could take a big fat dump of the data in any format they chose, zip it up and send it to the other controller, and it would be within the GDPR requirements.

If people think that GDPR grants consumers the right on which services exist and how data should represented etc, then I think they are misinformed.

Spotify could have answered with "That API is no longer available, but we will facilitate the transfer of an archived version of the data", and... I mean, what clause of GDPR does he have to complain or demand they do anything different?

No: the root of the matter is that it has to be "technically feasible", which with proprietary software you can't ever prove. This was a special case because they already showed it was possible (it was working), then they took it away.

Even here, if they reaaaaalllly cared (and had good reasons to, other than "we want to lock in customers"), they probably could take the feature away - they'd just need to play the CYA game much better, and be willing to risk a hefty fine based on whether a court believes your reasons for technical infeasibility. After all, not everything that was technically feasible stays so in a changing environment.

Another think they can do is just try occasionally, and see if people give up.

Which service/software works well for moving playlists between Music Services?

I'm trying to move from Google Music to Spotify. Moving my playlists has been my greatest pain. They usually don't find a lot of my musics, or worse, choose a different version of the music. Usually a live version of the music is chosen, full with annoying cheers of the audience.

I gave up on that, when I realized that Google's spin-down of the music service has meant MOST of the songs in my playlists are now gone. When Google de-licenses the music, it vanishes from playlists. I'm still amazed Spotify never built enough of a Google Music client to help users login and gather their playlists.

I stopped paying for Google Play Music years ago, once I found out about this behavior. Playlists carefully built over time, suddenly changing and shifting. Music is huge to me, and here was Google, playing with my memories. Not being able to listen to some songs is bad enough, but entirely remoing them from the lists felt like gaslighting. My memories were being played with, and Google was telling me "here's your playlist", but that wasn't my playlist anymore.

I've never noticed it. Another great reason to uploading my own music.

I've used tunemymusic.com for a few different migrations (Spotify to Apple Music, Apple Music to the trial of Youtube Music). It pretty good although you need to do some manual verification because it messes up around 1% of the time, especially with the more obscure stuff. Sometimes it'll transfer the song as a live version or even someone else's cover so a bit of manual verification is helpful.

What a legend. I love seeing people be so adamant in getting through bullshit corporate talk, and seeing it actually result in something for once is even more incredible.

It's amazing what you can do with some persistence and threats of legal action - especially when you mention using a lawyer and recouping costs.

Fantastic! Maybe the outrage here resulted in something good?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001

Also: I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music as a matter of principle after that drama. I hate the Youtube Music web UI so much, already.

Something really tickles me about a single individual standing up to a corporation and strongly and clearly stating that the company is violating the law of their country and they won't hesitate to prosecute in a civil court for their rights. I believe that is what true justice against corporate overreach should be like. Ordinary people standing up for themselves.

I much prefer the idea that we might vote for and fully fund a full time civil servant to protect us mere peons from corporate abuse. Often the abusive behavior is conducted out of sight or against a naive group of victims. Building up the capability in societies so individuals aren't victimized by their naivette is a net benefit.

I switched to Tidal for similar reasons and it has been really painful. Unfortunately the competition is so bad that Spotify can do really, really bad things before it outweighs their overall competence at service delivery.

I don’t understand how it got to this point; Tidal seems like the most viable option but I swear even back in 2008 the field had far more solid options (e.g. Zune, as much as it was a commercial failure, was really great to use IME).

I just don’t understand how other streaming services haven’t delivered something like Spotify Connect yet. It has been available and basically the standard for streaming since 2014 at least.

> Unfortunately the competition is so bad

Somehow Google had a really nice solution, but decided to kill it and replace with the broken YouTube music app. Given how few real competitors there were, I'm really confused by that one.

> I'm really confused by that one.

Google is a specialist in killing good products. They owned the news reader space and could probably have datamined it but killed Reader.

Edit: Removed a joke I made to avoid causing offense.

They do kill projects, but these are not really comparable. People paid directly for Google music. They also did not really kill it, but rather replace with an inferior version aiming at the same business. This is not even comparable to the chat/hangouts/meet migration.

I can find a reason, even if I don't agree with it, for most of their killed projects. This one is just... different.

I am sorry, I was trying to make a lighthearted joke but it must not have come across this way. I have removed the joke.

> People paid directly for Google music

In the case of many people they were paying for Youtube Premium and got Google Music for free.

> In the case of many people they were paying for Youtube Premium and got Google Music for free.

In the case of many people, it worked the other way around.

Please let me disagree. Google Music has a terrible UI (as Spotify). Their only great feature is the ability to upload your own music. I'm moving to Spotify just because my friends create playlists there and they can share with me. Also the music discovery algorithms in Spotify are way better.

My great pain is that I had terrible results with the softwares that I tried to use to move my playlists.

Google Music (Android) has been one of my favorite UX on the platform, ever. It is dirt simple and exposes their award-winning machine-learning powered search in useful ways.

Spotify's looks attractive but daily use makes me miss Google's app. Spotify's web player loses pretty hard to Google's for me, as well.

That said, I just can't stomach YT Music. I don't know what they were thinking. The new value proposition for Premium is ad-free YouTube, which I might just keep buying because I'm addicted to celebrity math professors, astronomy, and a few crafting/DIY channels these days. But I'm struggling to like a music service anymore.

Sure GM has some nice features that I miss, but countless times I've clicked in the back button and left the app. I really hate it.

> I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music

I have also suspended Premium and went for Youtube Music. But Youtube Music is even more closed system. There is no API and Google isn't planing any. With Spotify API I am able to export and transfer my playlists and other stuff if Spotify liked it or not.

I found during my journey (Google Music -> Youtube Music autoconvert -> Spotify import) several online tools which could read a public Youtube Music Playlist (mine are 500+ songs, so not small, not gigantic) and one which allowed me to copy my "likes" over (read YTM like, find same Spotify song and Like it) so there are tools out there even though we don't have official or supported APIs. I could not find one single service to do it all, it took.. I think 3 different services to work through the process.

The largest problem I think happened is many of the origin tracks from Google Music were incorrectly named or identified; I had to repair the process in both YTM and Spotify to try and find the actual track which I had in GPM but with bad metadata around it. The mistakes were high enough that I thought to myself "wow, Google Music really had a lot of bad metadata" during the work.

> I hate the Youtube Music web UI so much, already.

It's such a shame Grooveshark went under - they really nailed the UI. The only reason Spotify isn't too bad is because everyone knows it now, but back when it was relatively new, far too often people obliterated my entire queue just because they wanted to add a single song.

And the three tabs that are different but actually the same is intuitive at this point but I couldn’t explain how it works to anyone who doesn’t already know.

Double tab to reset a tab to its home screen is something I don’t think you discover except by accident.

Man, I haven't thought about Grooveshark in years. It was so good, but doomed from the beginning. They didn't have any sort of copyright agreements in place and they let users browse any songs uploaded by other users.

Another blast from the past: Lala. Before Apple bought them, you could buy the rights to stream any song from their website for 10 cents. This was during the era of dollar downloads, so you essentially got a steep discount in exchange for needing to use a non-mobile device. I loved that service.

And Lala let you match all your own music library and stream for free, just like the marquee feature of Google Play Music, but years ahead of time. Also they let you stream every song (that you didn’t already have) once for free, and then you only needed to pay for it after that.

Lala was amazing, and I was bitter with Apple for years when they killed it.

Yeah, YouTube Music is a dumpster fire. Don't use it myself, but Deezer is supposedly pretty good.

Have you considered Apple Music? If not, how come?

It only works on Apple devices. I use an iPhone but also a Windows PC. It’s extremely simple to not consider Apple Music if you don’t have all Apple devices. I hate that ultimatum of “use ONLY our products or have a subpar experience.”

It works on Android with an app and Windows in the browser. That being said, the subpar experience part is definitely something I agree with, and come to think of it, if I used Windows I probably wouldn't use Apple Music either.

EDIT: I'm pretty sure iTunes for Windows has Apple Music support actually: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210384

I've been using AM on Windows for years and years now. I want to say it's been there since inception but I'm not sure.

Might’ve been, but I think I recall it took them a couple of months.

Anyway, another factor in the decision could be that aside from Tidal, Apple Music pays the most to the actual artists per stream. Almost twice what Spotify pays, I believe.

You can access Apple Music through iTunes on Windows.

Apple music works great for me on Android, and their web player is pretty good (especially compared to the "native" Music.app on macOS).

How do I remove likes videos from my liked music. This annoys me the most after being force to switch from google music.

> I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music as a matter of principle after that drama.

That's funny, since I did the opposite when Google forced me to switch from Google Music to Youtube Music. I have decided to avoid Google services when possible, since they invariably end up unsupported and later killed off and maybe replaced with a worse option.

I also want to stay away from services from companies that doesn't have that service as their main focus. Google clearly doesn't really care about music, but it's pretty much all Spotify cares about. Apple isn't really a music company, but unlike Google they care about a coherent user experience within their ecosystem. I won't buy from Apple for different reasons, but compare Apple Watch and WatchOS, Apple TV and Youtube TV, Apple Music and Youtube Music, and so on. Picking a Google consumer service is almost always a guarantee for worse quality and an uncertain future.

For the same reasons I wouldn't touch Google Stadia, there's other companies with clearer gaming focus and better track record of keeping services available.

YT music is so bad. I switched from Play Music to Spotify a few months ago when they killed it cause I couldn't deal with YT.

For those that are interested in self-hosting I’ve had good success with airsonic and some of the clients for it on both iOS and Android.

On one hand it makes search a little more high-friction since My personal library will never be as huge as that of a streaming service. My workaround is treat Spotify like a radio and star songs I like to then download later.

In that way it’s a lot like interacting with music before streaming. It also forces me to curate a bit more.

Probably not for everyone, but I actually like it better, and I know that my library will always be there.

I host mine too because I'm not interested in paying ~$100/year for the rest of my life to access music, this is like welfare for tech giants and record companies and very little even trickles down to musicians. I got a Synology NAS and these days I just run the Synology operating system in a virtual machine and it's accessible via web UI or mobile apps and backs up to the cloud, this has served me very well for years now.

The google -> youtube music transition finally got me to self host too. I've been pretty happy with plex.

Getting my playlists out has actually been the only sticking point, so this has inspired me to see if there's a reasonable export option there too.

My self hosting solution at the moment is:

- Upload music to a webserver (can be anything, like Google Drive or in my case a OwnCloud server)

- Connect Astiga (https://asti.ga/) to it, which turns your storage (can be multiple storages, like some music on DropBox and some on an FTP or whatever) into a music library. For €24/year it will auto sync any changes automatically 24 times per day.

- Use the Astiga app (Android) or any SubSonic app (on iOS play:Sub is passable) to browse this library from your phone

To be honest, stuff like Apple Music is way more convenient. But I have my baseline of albums I “need to have” in lossless (and where possible hi-res) format in Astiga, perfectly tagged. Especially in case my rented access via Apple Music to this music is suddenly fucked with.

I noticed spotify delete tracks without telling you a few years back. So setup IFTT to write any files I add to a playlist to a gsheet

I think they don't do this anymore. I have some old playlists with some tracks greyed out so I think that's their new way of dealing with songs they no longer have rights to let us play.

I believe there's a setting somewhere in your account to turn this on, I think by default it just hides tracks that have been removed from the service. They stay there on the playlist (I guess in theory if the track comes back onto the service it'll reappear, but in practice I've found it's often a slightly different version that doesn't get matched up).

You are right, I have enabled it myself.

There's also a bit of explanation about this at https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/t...

ye I noticed they swap them sometimes as well. which i hate. i'm really picky about that. Even slightest difference to the version I like can make me hate any other version. so getting one slightly faster from another album is no good for me.

They don't do that anymore: unplayable songs are greyed out, but they still show on playlists.

It would be great to get notifications when this happens, though.

I switches to Apple Music more than a year ago. It isn’t as good as Spotify (yet?), but I had some bad experiences setting up a legit family account with Spotify, so that got me angry enough to switch.

What I do like about Apple Music is being able to use Siri and my car’s radio can see all my music when I plug in my phone.

Those are features of Apple Monopoly rather than Apple Music.

Siri can access Spotify and also be used in CarPlay

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri/

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/can-i-use-spotify-in-...

With Apple Music, I believe you can say:

"Hey Siri, play X".

Can you do this with Spotify? Or do you have to always say "on Spotify" for every request ever?

"on Spotify". Amazon at least lets you set a default music platform for Alexa devices that isn't their own.

I recently bought a iPhone SE and forced myself to use it as my primary phone. This "on Spotify" is really annoying and really summarizes the whole iOS experience. If you dont fully by into their walled garden you will have to deal with a lot of minor annoyances. I was thinking about switching over to Apple Music for a bit to see if I like the whole user experience a bit more even if apple music on its own is inferior.

They've only just added a default browser setting, give them a moment on this one

> I was thinking about switching over to Apple Music for a bit to see if I like the whole user experience a bit more even if apple music on its own is inferior.

I’m not sure what part of the service you consider ‘inferior’ to Spotify (I personally dislike Spotify’s UI/UX), but  Music’s iOS integration is really great. I can also use it in my android devices and Sonos stuff too.

I also find Music’s professionally-curated playlists (and radio stations now that there are a variety) to be far superior to any algorithm I’ve come across for music discovery.

Yes, this is the difference for me too. Apple's curated playlists look like an actual human made them with some forethought. Spotify's playlists are just autogenerated.

On the other hand Spotify's "Discover Weekly" is vastly superior to Apple Music's "New Music Mix".

Siri support must be new. I don't have CarPlay. I have one of those old school iPod radios. Apple Music's playlists, artists, podcasts, etc all show up fine. Spotify didn't work when I tried it.

That doesn't change anything to me though, does it?

Yeah I tried switching to Apple Music and it just doesn't feel as good.

The radio feature is nowhere near as good - recommendations are not great and you can't save stations (or queue up radios - they immediately start)

Search isn't very good, the UI is clunky, sharing playlists is confusing.

The only thing that might be going for it is being able to add our own music. I'm trying to persevere with it but I don't see any real value to switching.

This is good. Now if only they'd stop trying to wall off the podcast market.

glares angrily at Joe Rogan

I can’t really fault Joe for taking the money, as I think I probably would have done the same if given the chance. But man it sucks that this is the direction podcasting is headed. It is going to be so annoying in the future when you need 4 podcasting clients to play all your podcasts.

I wonder how much they're automating the protection of their auto-generated playlists (if at all) - for example, does it know if I look at an auto-generated playlist, create a new one, then fill it with all the same songs in the same order?

Not as far as I can tell, and I believe they let you do point-in-time copies. I’ve got a copy of mint, formerly electroNow (it was better when it was electroNow) from June 2017 in my collection.

On the desktop client you can select all songs on a playlist, right click and add to a new playlist. This new lis shows up as able to be transferred with SongShift. I did it last night as a PoC, I’ve done it it previously to customize some Spotify playlists here and there and will be my method going forward to keep lists in sync between services now. Just in case they try to pull access again.

That's good. This change needed to Spotify become "justice" in platform war context.

Nice to read, they were in the wrong, got berated for it and now they changed it. This is how things are supposed to go.

Now can we please do the same for Apple?

Can you be specific on what issues we should berate Apple and why? Not being argumentative, just curious what they are doing that harms you as a customer (?) shareholder (?) employee (?)

Not being able to set Spotify as a default music app for Siri.

Finally! I've been hesitant to switch from spotify because of my playlists, but now I might finally make the switch.

Nice, now I can keep using Spotify without feeling bad.

This was the sort of thing that made me consider migrating to a different service.

wow this is great! I didn't think much would come of that original post last week

Back in the day, when they had a native application, I remember you could just use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C to copy a list of all songs in a playlist that you could past anywhere else (including Notepad, or another Spotify playlist)—does that work anymore?

Also, they have a web app now. Shouldn't it be very easy to write a bookmarklet to dump a list of all songs in the current playlist?

Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C works to get a list of urls to the songs in a playlist on the format https://open.spotify.com/track/<trackId>

Yep, that still works. Copying "songs" puts the song URLs into your clipboard, which you can indeed paste into other playlist, other accounts, or anywhere else.

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