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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I see the data is coming from Spotify, my experience from trying to use their api was that use cases are quite restrictive and you had to request access (they would let us do what we wanted).

If the developer is here, what is the agreement you have with Spotify? Do you have any plans of offering an API yourselves?

I would be interested in a paid api that gave us access to the data available though the Spotify api, they don’t offer one.

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You can find the Spotify Developer Terms here: https://developer.spotify.com/terms

Basically, you're not allowed to sell the Spotify in any way.

In those terms, it says "you may not store, aggregate or create compilations or databases of Spotify Content". So for this site to be compliant, they should be serving up the data directly from the Spotify API, which ought to get rate limited pretty quickly (when on the HN frontpage and all), unless they somehow got a very large quota.

I’m serving everything from the Spotify API directly on Noiseblend (https://noiseblend.com) and rate limit has never been a problem.

When a request fails because of a rate limit, Spotify responds with 429 and a Retry-After header so you know when to schedule the next request.

In my tests, that header never had a value greater than 10 seconds, and 429 responses were very rare.

Right, but you are using user login, and I think that gives you a lot more rate than a single account doing all the requests, which is what you need to get the no-sign-in experience on songdata.io - right?

Indeed, I forgot about that part...

I think all of my requests to Spotify have been done on behalf of authenticated users. But I guess you could authenticate with your own user to lift up the limits.

Spotify rate limits are per app, not per user.

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