Please continue supporting iOS/Android streaming SDKs | Hacker News Reader

Please continue supporting iOS/Android streaming SDKs

community.spotify.com

122 pointspjmq67 comments

1. Embrace - come build on our open APIs! Make us more relevant! All welcome! It’s not going to be like Twitter.

2. Extend - That’s a nice feature you’ve got there, shame if someone were to copy it.

2a. Hey podcasts are much cheaper to produce than songs, we can make our own, and people will spend their time listening to those instead of expensive licensed music. Buy all the podcasters, control what they say! Selection for Societal Sanity!

3. Extinguish - you keep calling the APIs that make us pay licensing fees. We can’t push our own content if we don’t control the UI. Albums are expensive, you should REALLY try our cheaper playlists. No? Then good riddance.

I don't know if I even need to continue supporting Spotify anymore.

Between Discogs and YouTube, I am having no trouble discovering and acquiring high quality content that can be used arbitrarily. For a period of time, I thought that old-school CDs were actually dead. Today, I get regular emails from la-la land records about incredibly esoteric 90s cartoon soundtracks that I can purchase new. I believe that there has never been a better time to get into physical media. I've got a lot of stuff on hand that you cannot listen to on Spotify. You won't even find some of these artists or "labels" in there.

Spotify also puts me in a really bad mood when they decide certain content is no longer permitted for playback. Every time this happens I spend about 3 hours ripping my most recently-favorited tracks via audio driver trickery, just in case it happens again.

The only value proposition for me is that their app is ubiquitous and can be controlled from any device. If I could find something similar to the Spotify application experience that I could point at my own backend, I think I might go for it.

And, I totally get the other target audience: People who just want some mindless background music or podcast while they drive or do cardio. Spotify is amazing at this, but it's not really a big selling point for me. Definitely not enough value for me to pay a monthly subscription fee.

> Spotify also puts me in a really bad mood when they decide certain content is no longer permitted for playback.

As far as I know, this is rarely Spotify's choice; usually this is done by an artist, or more commonly their distributor, intentionally pulling their music from platforms.

Well, that’s because they get paid in peanut dust and breadcrumbs

True but it's also really cheap to get/keep your music on there if you want. Distrokid is $20/year, CDBaby is $5 one-time per track/album, and if you just want Spotify specifically you can do it through Amuse for free (with slow release times and # of track limitations), or onerpm if you're willing to give away a % of the royalties.

That means someone isn't using the other playback or download method that pays more.

I just signed up for Spotify recently, and was completely flabbergasted to discover that an album that I've been listening to for over thirty years was rerecorded by the original artist, and the original album is now unobtainable. This rerecording is horrible, unlistenable, and I fear that this is the version that will be recognized in legacy because it is all that Spotify makes available.

No, Spotify as a business is not to blame here. But the concept of storing our media in a fashion which allows it to be erased or altered (e.g. in the cloud) has consequences.

Curious - what album?

Not who you replied to, but one example is Megadeth — most of their albums from the 80s and 90s are only available remastered. I wouldn’t call them unlistenable but they are different. They do have one album, “Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying”, available with TWO DIFFERENT remasters but no original.

You nailed it. I was specifically referring to Rust in Peace, but the rest of the early albums suffer the same.

For me the albums are unlistenable because I can hear that it's not e.g. Marty playing on Rust. And the songs are just slightly different in so many places, it is unexpected and unnerving to hear something one is so familiar with being suddenly altered.

I'll listen to most performances of e.g. Beethoven's 9th and enjoy and embrace the changes and differences. Likewise, I'll listen to Rust in concert with the different guitarists and drummers (and bassist now) and enjoy their interpretations of the music. But albums recorded by the original artists are in my opinion a canonical immutable piece - some remasters for sound quality may be in order (The Beatles are a great example) but those remasters aim for preserving the original art. Not so with these rerecordngs which serve only to cut royalty payments to the original guitarist and drummer with whom Dave is now in a feud, the art itself (and fans of the art) be damned.

...likely because Spotify offered a pittance to continue licensing the music.

Bait and switch is the name of the game with Spotify and Netflix. No wonder they're shoveling money into creating their mostly garbage IP they can own.

I was tired of Spotify's dominance in the music streaming space vs how poor their UI is, how little they pay artists, and how anticompetitive they grew vs other services (ex. last.fm scrobbling).

I switched to buying tracks from artists, using Plex to stream the tracks from my home server, and using Tidal to stream tracks I don't have yet. What's nice is Plex also supports Tidal integration, so I have all my music in one place.

It's not a perfect experience, but if I'm going to put my money toward a subpar experience, I'd rather it go to an underdog. Also, Tidal supposedly gives a slightly larger fraction of the profits to artists. Ironically, from what I could find online, Napster apparently gives the largest fraction.

Tidal will sooner or later cut plex out too...

Maybe, if they don't want me as a customer anymore. I almost exclusively use their service via plexamp, and I'm sure they know that.

IMO it's in all but the largest streaming service' best interest to allow more ways for customers to access their service. It's their best chance at disruption. I don't see tidal cutting off plex until tidal feels dominant, or the plex userbase is too small. As long as Spotify and Apple are competitors, I don't see them feeling that level of dominance, but the number of people using plex tidal integration probably isn't huge...which is why I'm mentioning it in this thread!

> You won't even find some of these artists or "labels" in there.

Indeed! All of Traumprinz / Giegling are not on any streaming service (but are often wonderful) https://www.discogs.com/label/144751-Giegling

Some artists do limited runs, eg a handful of cassettes. Here’s one that was a 50 count run of USB sticks: https://www.discogs.com/release/14433973-Benton-Volume-Two

Don't even need Audio driver trickery. All you need is a desktop PC, and a 3.5mm jack cable with male ends on both sides, about $5 on Amazon. Plug the headphone jack output into the line in and hit Record. Quality is decent enough, and its so stupidly easy that it becomes obvious why Audio Copy Protection DRM never had a chance.

HDMI capture on desktop via USB-C to HDMI adapter can give even better quality, audio is transmitted digitally via HDMI.

Theres also the bit where Spotify traffic is zero rated on tmobile.

But net neutrality, blah blah blah.

I strongly lean towards spotify instead of YouTube for music solely because of this.

If you haven’t tried already it’s worth looking at Bandcamp. There are a lot of new CDs (and tapes and vinyl) for sale on there from independent labels.

Why would I want physical media? I listen to music on the go, at the gym, working, traveling and with friends.

Do you have any favourite artists? what do you do when they have a new release? surely Spotify monthly sub out weighs the cost of buying new albums. I love the discover feature, I love being able to search for any artist, at any time - my taste changes with my mood.

Not sure how YouTube even compares, especially with adverts, their monthly sub is costs more than spotify.

BTW i'm an 80s kid and used to collect a lot of vinyl. I love physical media but it doesn't compare to what Spotify is offering, especially for 10.99 EUR/month

> Why would I want physical media?

For me? So I am free to CD-rip them.

I would be also fine with DRM-free digital files.

> Why would I want physical media?

To put something on the shelves at home, perhaps?

When I buy a record or Tshirt at a show, I know that a significant portion of the profit goes directly to the artist. When I pay for a Spotify subscription, it's like cable TV --- I'm paying for a bunch of crap I'm never going to watch/listen to.

What boils my blood the most about this is the fact Spotify lured developers in the early days, filled out their functional gaps and got free feature validation through those developers, bought and shuttered the Echonest to ensure devs would mostly only build for Spotify and its (Premium) subscriber base and then invested nothing into the developer ecosystem after that, instead chipping away at the existing tools and stopped responding to developers emails.

It feels like Spotify showed music devs a green pasture and then corralled them into a slaughter pit (so to speak).

This seems standard and entirely predictable progression of events, given that everything depended on proprietary, centrally controlled software and enormous pile of contracts?

Has anyone expected anything else?

You're not wrong. But if Spotify doesn't want to allow developers to be lab rats for wild and whacky ideas that are too risky for them to try themselves but could eventually either become or reveal the next big thing, they're leaving themselves wide open to major disruption.

I hope so! Not entirely is it true, network effects may be really powerful here. And "negotiate with 18383838 copyright holders" is not a small task.

This was a financial executive decision for sure. A lot of those tend to be hostile towards paying customers.

As of September 1st, Spotify concluded its half-decade-long effort to stop developers from building experiences that allowed streaming outside of their own first-party apps.

Starting with libspotify and then switching off their streaming SDKs earlier this month. An alternative to both was promised but none ever materialised.

As a result, hundreds of apps still using this SDK out of necessity, have gone dark.

Doesn't libspotify still work, albeit unofficially, because of old integrations in cars and other devices?

It died in May if the Spotify dev announcement page is to be believed. AFIK both the streaming SDKs and libspot used the same APIs under the hood so if it wasn't dead before...

It’s been working for me, installed on a Linux computer attached to my sound system:

https://lee-phillips.org/spotifyRemoteLinux/

Bottom line is I can use the official Spotify client on my phone to get music from my stereo without using bluetooth.

This is why I can't understand the whole streaming garbage. There one day, gone the next.

I never could understand how people can just rely on always having internet, or the service, available.

I get my podcasts from whomever's webpage and just listen when I have time and delete when done if not worth keeping.

Hopefully this will be a learning experience for younguns. My own kids love spotify. They pay for premium (meaning I do), but still always complain.

I will say some of the playlists they listen to have turned me on to some really cool music. I see that as their only value to me, personally, but I still download them to have a listen at-will.

I truly feel so bad for all the devs who put so much time, effort, and money into something to be yanked. But I also can't imagine my project hinging on the whims of a random company.

> This is why I can't understand the whole streaming garbage. There one day, gone the next.

It's a rental model.

If Spotify ever shuts down, I can switch to any of its competitors quickly enough and I have lost nothing.

> I never could understand how people can just rely on always having internet, or the service, available.

I've been using Spotify for over 10 years, and I cannot recall a single time where I've been unable to use the service due to being offline and the offline features of their app not working. Not that I am ever offline much these days.

>Hopefully this will be a learning experience for younguns.

Most young people (and most users full stop) are going to be using the official apps, web app, or supported third-party devices and aren't going to notice a thing.

I tend to listen to the same music that I like. Additions to my regular listening collection are fairly slow. So it isn't quite the same for me. If it were the nineties, I'd buy an album every few months. I could stop paying, and still have my music.

Admittedly, Spotify is good for instant access and discovery. But it costs more than what I would otherwise be spending on buying albums.

This is a link to a complaint. Can someone either point to the official announcement or go into detail about what was allowed and what changed?

Shutdown on 1st September: https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2022/07/15/mobi...

I switched to Tidal a few months ago after getting sick of them pushing podcasts non-stop and some other annoyances. Tidal is fine, but I do miss all the user-created playlists from Spotify.

I also still sometimes buy music through Bandcamp if it isn't available on Tidal or if I want to support the artist.

Where is the Tidal 3rd party streaming API/SDK? Or any API at all, for that matter?

(Certainly not here: https://tidal.com/browse/artist/4481527)

Tidal does seem to have some integrations (at least roon and volumio)

MQA is largely snake oil; they do have some nice sounding masters though.

Apple Music now has hires audio also. I’m yet to decide between the two. Apple Music is edging Tidal out for me due to the quality of their curated playlists

Roon and Volumio both label themselves as audiophile audio players. I guess that's why I hadn't heard about any of them.

Also, the term audiophile has turned into a red flag, at least to me.

Isn't Apple Music hi-res/lossless audio (ALAC) also snake oil when compared to high bitrate psychoacoustic codecs such as those used by e.g. Spotify Premium?

https://www.macworld.com/article/346595/no-one-actually-need...

The article calls all lossless compression snake oil. Personally, I do like Dolby Atmos on Apple Music - especially for Classical.

Personally I was convinced by double-blind tests done about 20 years ago. It's been a while, but I think it was by heise.de (with the c't magazine).

I think if you have spent the time, money and research getting good sounding equipment that you like, it’s kinda automatic to also pick a streaming service which claims to offer higher quality even if you’re aware that you’re imagining it.

I have about 2000 gbp worth of headphone gear (I’m not an audiophile, but I do like good sound) and I managed to convince myself tidal sounds better than Spotify..

Is it bullshit? Probably but at the end of the day, there’s a tenner difference and meh, it’s far less important than my amp or cans.

I have about 2000 gbp worth of headphone gear (I’m not an audiophile, but I do like good sound)

;-)

cough yeah fair point. Some of the people I know have 8000 gbp power amps on each one of their speakers though, so I recon I’m still in the clear ;)

Yeah, there’s a lot of nonsense around. I still really like the sound of my grados&tube amp though, even if a lot of that is a kind of self delusion ;)

A lot of the hires stuff around hasn’t just been ripped from CDs though, or is mastered differently and to my ears some tracks clearly sound better than from CD but it’s all subjective.

Audiophiles aren’t hurting anyone but their bank balances, and we get some nice headphones trickling down to those of us happy enough with <1k a set ;)

I use Spotify Premium and Apple Music. I consistently find the audio quality of Apple Music to be miles ahead of Spotify. I don’t even use any audiophile-level gear.

FYI plex has tidal integration. I use it so my personal track library and tidal can be accessed from the same place.

That's why torrents will survive for the foreseeable future. People got clever about avoiding these bait-and-switch schemes now that spending 5 min torrenting and 150 MB of storage per album became the easy, safe and private approach again.

Podcasts are a different case, however. Best option is just drop the ones that do not provide a RSS feed and let these authors linger.

I'm just tired of streaming companies, both audio and video.

Others have been suggesting Libspotify still works for legacy embedded device reasons... https://github.com/mopidy/libspotify-archive seems to have Android and iOS builds.

I was looking for motivation to cancel. Thanks.

It's probably related to licensing, either because it makes it too easy to embed songs where you'd ordinarily need a separate license or because it makes it too easy to rip to the stream.

https://github.com/xou816/spot still works for me.

I use that on my Pinephone to play music.

If/when that stops, to continue playing music on my Pinephone will require migrating to a self-managed collection. Disappointing but doable.

Can anyone recommend DRM free music providers?

> Can anyone recommend DRM free music providers?

I have some download from Bandcamp.

+CD-ripped music from physical media I own.

Does this mean that full song play from the API doesn't work anymore, or it's about something else?

essentially yes. You can use the web SDK to play songs but it's a very poor experience. Native apps can no longer play full songs.

I'm surprised that was possible in the first place. How were there no clients that implemented Spotify then? I'd have loved to use something less shitty than the Spotify player, both on Linux where they keep breaking things that used to work and on Android where offline mode is a joke.

The only third party Spotify player apps I saw were remote controls that just talked to a connected "device" (potentially on localhost).

There were tons of unofficial clients, mostly open source efforts as Spotify didn't allow for any monetizable components in apps so it never made much sense to build a business off the back of it.

I would call the experience anything but shitty. And yes, there are numerous of apps building on top of this, I maintain an app in production that use it.

Is it temporary or permanent?

Permanent. Spotify doesn't want apps streaming music through anything other than Spotify's own walled experience for a number of seemingly financial reasons others have highlighted here.

I switched from google music to spotify because google made it impossible to use google music from an account on a custom domain with google home.

Spotify is okay, but I wouldn't hesitate to move if something else is out there that has better value.

YouTube has better music selection and with a little setup you can get the same quality of life features as Spotify.

But you can't legally build music apps atop YouTube/YouTube music from what I can see.

Sorry! It's their platform and they can kill all third party apps whenever they want to.

I find it extremely risky to build an entire business out of someone else's unofficial API.

To Downvoters: I'm trying to help you here.

Did you not see the top comment about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic that Spotify and many other companies have used for their API's? [0] Similarly, If your app is in trouble [1] and the upstream provider suspends access to the APIs, your business is totally finished, but not if you are a larger company providing the API (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc)

So don't depend or build your entire business on someone else's API. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725714

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796

official APIs*

It was not unofficial.

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