Spotify has shut down several API endpoints | Hacker News Reader

Spotify has shut down several API endpoints

developer.spotify.com

293 pointsleecoursey290 comments

I recently just started using psst which is a Spotify GUI that's much lighter. When you right click a song and go to show similar tracks u get an array of sliders corresponding to the audio analysis/features like valence, danceability, energy, etc to tweak the recommendations.

It made a light and day difference for music discoverability for me, while the default spotify radio keeps giving me songs i skip instantly multiple times along with songs I've listened to a hundred times, doing this through the API, is 100x better. I've discovered 30 new songs that I love this past week while that number has been steadily dwindling for the past 6 months using Spotify.

I've always wanted a slider that gives increasingly eclectic and random selections for the radio playlists.

Psst sounds good, I'll try it, hopefully the API changes have not affected it.

We're also working on that very same idea on our open-source music discovery platform ListenBrainz: https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/

Basically because we had the same gripes about Spotify's "one size fits all" approach ourselves and wanted to develop something better.

Spotify has enabled fabulous and powerful music discovery experiences for me. For sure it's not perfect and there are many ways to discover music - I'm really glad that you and others are working on new ideas in this space. But I reckon it will be hard to compete with Spotify's algorithmic playlisting expertise and resources.

It would be nice if Spotify added some deeper playlisting functionality tools to give users a bit more control.

However, for me, algorithms are just tools and the best 'radio' will always come from DJs and other humans making mixes and music programs.

Thanks for this suggestion, I’ll try it. I have also been frustrated with Spotify for replaying the same stuff over and over. I tried their new AI playlist feature and prompted it for “tracks with fewer than 10,000 plays”; it correctly named the playlist something with “underground” in the title but failed at delivering on the premise. That’s really what I want - stuff that is similar to what I’m into in terms of genre, but obscure and fresh. There have to be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of tracks it could try out on me, but it seems to recycle the same 100 or so tracks over and over again.

I've started to wonder how much Spotify is gaming the system. For example, by playing tracks lower royalties over tracks with higher ones. There could be some backdoor payola and we would never know.

It is amazing to me that the markets are rewarding an audio streaming business that has yet to publish an annual profit after 20 years:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

https://companiesmarketcap.com/spotify/marketcap/

One would think Spotify’s potential is capped by their expenses (in the hands of the music owners - Universal/Warner/Sony), and the pricing of their competitors, with the deepest pockets in the world (Apple/Alphabet/Amazon).

That chart shows a profit in 2024, and new investors don’t necessarily care about long term history. Tech monopolies have history been so valuable it’s not an unreasonable bet.

A biased algorithm gives them increasing power over time.

Music streaming is not and will not be a monopoly. Spotify has near zero pricing power, with a floor at what their vendors charge them and a ceiling at what their multiple competitors charge. It’s a pretty fungible service.

They have a profit for first three quarters of 2024, and maybe they will continue to eke out a small profit margin, but I’m not seeing what the play is for its current market cap.

> Music streaming is not and will not be a monopoly.

People disagree. Spotify more than twice as many subscribers as the next most popular service. That’s not some stable equilibrium.

That “small” profit is already 1b/year and the quarterly profit has been increasing rapidly. Suggesting it’s only possible that that number will maintain exactly the same or less is just an assumption on your part. The market disagrees.

A lot of the profit has come via a price increase and radical downsizing plus big costs cuts. So whether it can be sustained long term will be interesting.

It’s based on the potential for significant growth in streaming, and price increases. The major labels and Spotify agree that the price should be increased regularly - after no uplift for a decade - and as more countries begin to adopt streaming the labels and Spotify see significant potential for growth.

The CEO of Warner Music Group - the smallest of the three majors - Robert Kyncl, ex-YouTube exec, said on the company’s most recent earnings call that he believes the penetration of cable TV and SVOD is a good indicator of streaming’s potential, and currently subscription music streaming is lagging behind.

There is explosive growth in some countries that were until recently delivering little: for example something like 95% of Brazil’s recorded music revenue comes from streaming. That’s happened in a pretty short period of time.

There are currently fewer than 1 billion paying streaming subscribers across all platforms globally, but 1 billion is close. It will have taken around 18 years to reach 1 billion paying subscribers; I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit 2 billion in a third of that time. So by 2030 or shortly afterward there may be 2 billion paying subscribers and it’s likely that Spotify will continue to have the lion’s share of those.

It has deep relationships with the major labels and can use high value subscribers in developed territories to subsidise adoption in developing makers.

According to Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, in the US and some major European markets the company has significantly pulled back on marketing spend, but that hasn’t really harmed acquisition - plus a lot of consumers are going from account creation to paid subscription without converting through ad-supported.

Penetration in the biggest markets is still well under 50% of the population - around 30% to 35% - compared to 50% penetration for cable TV and SVOD.

I agree that the valuation seems detached from reality - but the last three quarters have helped build people’s expectations, and the share price has gone from around $170 a year ago to $450+ more recently.

Whether it can sustain that remains to be seen, it’s a crazy multiple, but the relationships Spotify has with the major labels give it a most that makes it hard for new regional competitors to launch, and its overall offering - and marketing clout - makes it hard for established regional competitors to compete effectively.

Apple investors are just as allergic of a music division losing money. Shareholders keep companies efficient.

Apple does not need to lose money on anything. They might choose to sell music at 1% profit margin, because they're earning 40% profit margin on iCloud backup and iPhones.

I doubt Spotify investors will be happy with 1% profit margins.

Hasn't this been the main goal of their optimization of recent years, understandably to be honest because the percentage the major labels get of their income is massive, they're giving away what like 70% to labels/distributors?

Dunno how you can be expected to build a business that surfaces the objective best content when your hands are tied giving away that much.

This has been speculated in a video I watched yesterday about AI music flooding Spotify: https://youtu.be/UShsgCOzER4?si=2ENdyl0ifbu09Ke-&t=1072

For a start, they pad some of their popular playlists with in-house producers: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-creating-i...

This seems to be very obvious to me when I see the recommended playlists I get handed. Some good bait, but lots of filler tripe.

I just want my old last.fm era back.

Amen. Man, I found so much new music back then.

Similarly I have fond memories of the last.fm era, discovering new music via people with similar tastes who I might often end up chatting to. Wasn't it also around this time that Pandora (using the Music Genome project) was also more readily available, seem to remember that was also a good way to discover new music.

But then I'm old enough, pre internet, to also remember the days when people used to send each other mixtapes or you'd go round someone's house with a small selection of vinyl you'd play to each other.

And then there was the more recent (pre lockdown) era of going to see live bands and discovering new bands via the bands that were supporting or via conversations with other people at those gigs, who if you saw them enough times became your mates etc.

Nowadays I can spin up a program to generate a playlist of everyone playing the Great Escape or Glastonbury (assuming they haven't boycotted spotify) and listen to all of them before I even get there and because of the number of acts, given slightly different tastes, unless I make an effort I might not even see my mates....

I'm old enough to remember 4 record stores in my provincial city and they were all selling the same CDs.

I think that secretly most people don't want to discover new music they want to listen to what other people are listening. That's why labels are still in business.

Most people subconsciously don't want to discover new music, they want to listen to songs that remind them of the world and feelings of freedom and discovery and experience they had in their late teens.

They want nostalgia. They don't want cognitive load, they want enjoyment with no strings and no effort.

Well I don't judge but yeah every year around Christmas we get another collection box of the Beatles and Bob Dylan...

Musical taste just seems to stop developing somewhere in your 20s or 30s.

Spotify is quite frustrating sometimes.

I live in Spain, so it suggests Spanish podcasts to me, even though I only listen to podcasts in English or Catalan.

Music the same, I mostly listen to music in either Catalan or English, with a couple of Spanish songs in my lists. But lots of his suggestions are for music in Spanish. Heck, I just see that one of his recommendations is new things in Flamenco, even though it's a musical genre I haven't listened a single song of (nothing against it per se, only that I don't like it).

As I'm using it more to listen to podcasts now I find it hard to listen to music, because if I leave a podcast mid reproduction and play some music I have to remember which podcast it was, search for it, and then I can listen to the rest. Two separate modes, one for music, one for podcasts, would be good. Maybe a mixed one for people who do both mixed.

I will not add on how most of the music it suggests (when not suggesting things that I like) are things I already have in my lists, not good things that I could add to them.

It needs some work.

The primary issue is that Spotify can only group things into very coarse categories.

If you have a Spanish emo rock band and want similar Spanish emo rock bands then you are mostly out of luck unless there are so many of those that Spotify considers them their own category. Most likely you are going to get just Spanish popular artists if the category is small enough.

I think their embedding vector for musical styles is just way, way too small.

It always seems to be the large tech companies that think they are so clever tying the language to your IP location rather than your language preferences.

Google, Spotify, PayPal and others all seem convinced, no matter what I do, that because my IP address is in Japan that I should be shown Japanese language.

I'd like to use kilometres instead of miles in Google Maps, but I live in the UK, so it's Not Allowed. Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On the web you can for directions at least, select the "Options" button next to the "Leave Now" time selection, it has a distance units to switch between Automatic / Miles / km. To switch the little scale in the bottom right, just click it.

On the iOS app it's "User"->Settings->Distance Units (I assume Android is similar).

(And if you want to adjust Apple Maps in metric, it is a bit more cryptic, it follows the general system settings app, in General->Language & Region->Measurement System, with a choice of Metric / US / UK).

Well, slap my ass 10 times and call me Charles Maurice. When was that introduced?

Charles, it's been there for a decade or more.

I find it so frustrating when software and web pages don’t default to using the locale info I’ve set in my system settings. Add an app-specific option if you must, but I’d love if these things just worked by default.

This is partially a business issue; there’s a lot of money exchanging hands to push specific artists and the major labels are obviously the primary beneficiaries. This affects everything from playlist placement, recommendations, search results, etc.

https://github.com/jpochyla/psst/issues/561

Yeah it uses exactly those endpoints that are being deprecated for the feature that the parent comment is referencing.

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

https://github.com/jpochyla/psst/blob/69314f9fe8e86d57a678ab...

Thanks for the suggestion of trying psst. It is nice to see some innovation!

Can you explain how you use the recommendation feature? What does it mean to enable one of the checkboxes based on a certain song I like? Will it override the 'liveness' or 'danceability' of original song or emphasize that this aspect is particular important to match to the original song?

Two important things that psst needs to improve is reducing clicks when switching songs and showing album/song icons for each song.

Without having looked at the implementation, I am pretty sure the baseline song recommendations remain ie: if I change those sliders while on the recommended tracks page, it'll apply a filter over all the recommended tracks of the song depending on my input. The results I get are similar in genres/feeling mostly to the root dong, just feeling more in line with my settings.

Again, this is just anecdotal, will have to look at how psst does it to be a 100% sure.

Psst is excellent, I generally use it because it uses about 1/6 the memory (50MB vs 300MB).

Perhaps someone knowledgeable in Rust can help figure out this bug: https://github.com/jpochyla/psst/issues/348

Solid code base for early Rust contributions IMO.

APIs that don't put money on the table are being phased out. Musk did it with twitter and it didn't die (I'm not debating quality/financials). Then reddit did it (and even blocked VPNs) and it didn't die. Sure, it might've lost some quality, but the stock is up 200% since March.

So as long as they're winning, every corp is going to either shut down APIs or absurdly gouge prices. This is the new internet that we've voted for with money and attention.

Not trying to be "that douchey old times" guy but back in 2005 you could access many APIs for things like weather, temperature, ongoing projects, lists of conference locations, lists of RSS subscriptions, insect population predictions, all sorts.

Today they still exist, but with the exception of the most basic and dated corporate free APIs (e.g. reddit) they are gated by API keys and often access limits.

It was truly rare to see access limits in 2005; APIs were slow and unreliable but not limited.

If anyone documented the loss of APIs (particularly in 2008 IIRC?) I would to read more about it myself too. I think Tom Scott did a video on this, but I can't find it.

So it seems old times weren’t that douchey.

To recap: - no one locked down APIs - you could access a wide variety of them - no limits on them - they were slow and unreliable

As APIs became reliable & fast, they imposed limits on them

So not sure what was lost considering it sounds like they didn’t work well and when they did work they were incredibly slow aka self imposed rate limiting

Were these APIs just free and open? Open to subscribers or to anyone?

Because I'd be happy to pay a bit more to have api access to a service I use, perhaps because I'm using some 3rd party software etc. For example, now I'm using offical apps for Reddit and Twitter, whereas in the past I used great third party apps (Apollo and Tweetbot) which were an order of magnitude better. Sure, they never showed the ads. But just let me pay with money instead of using a shitty app and seeing ads?

Free accounts can access the Spotify API, last time I checked.

I've been also thinking this. They should have a tier for users that want to use 3rd-party integrations, and/or a tier for people who want to create such things. Strava could also do something like this. However, both companies have been going the other way and crippling their existing free APIs, and then suffering user backlash. It's almost like it's a bad idea to remove features... Who'd have thought.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Strava/comments/1gv4dob/strava_anno...

Twitter closed API access long before musk arrived. It used to be fully open. I think perhaps they were trying to make the API a little less useless, but it would never return to its full glory (maybe for data ingest, but certainly not read).

Any platform that relies on serving ads will not have a full-featured API, because it's an obvious way to ignore ads (and maintaining the API costs you money).

API isn't free.

> API isn't free.

It never has been free, but they string along developers for as long as it's convenient and then turn against them. It's a pretty obvious pattern, yet devs fall for it every time.

> So as long as they're winning, every corp is going to either shut down APIs or absurdly gouge prices. This is the new internet that we've voted for with money and attention.

I think you’re missing the real cause of this shift: These free APIs existed during the investment-fueled growth phase, then disappeared when they started switching into the real business mode.

We had an unusually long period of time where companies could play the startup game of spending money and headcount on things that didn’t generate much or any revenue. Free APIs were an artifact of that. The disappearance of the Twitter and Reddit APIs coincides with them shifting toward profitability.

You don’t have to “vote for” anything for this to happen. When it stops being easy to run companies at a loss year over year, the parts of the company that aren’t generating more revenue than they cost either get price increases or dropped entirely.

I’ve been at a startup-like company going through this change. It was sad, though not at all surprising, when management started taking inventory of everything people were working on and cross referencing it with how much that was generating in revenue. There were a few moments of internal revelation when someone realized that entire teams of expensive engineers had been working on features and products that either very few people used or that were very complex but generated no revenue. It doesn’t make business sense.

The abuse landscape has also changed dramatically. In the early days, free APIs were rarely used features by a few power users. Now, any free API is guaranteed to be abused by some growth hacking startup who wants to vacuum up all of your data and use it for SEO spam, AI training, or other purposes.

> The disappearance of the Twitter and Reddit APIs coincides with them shifting toward profitability.

Not just profitability, but more profit.

> You don’t have to “vote for” anything for this to happen.

No, but once they shut the door on 3rd party apps people still use the services, even if it's a shittier experience. So why wouldn't they restrict or shut down APIs?

This is a standard technology company strategy. Isolate your customers, remove their options, markup the price.

In this case, it's not related to the cost of API support. Nowadays, it is worth nothing to generate a swagger-like document and share it. Moreover, it's already generated for internal purposes. It is all about loyal people around the company, and because of this, startups are trying to communicate with these people. But after an IPO, the main focus is to just earn as much as they can, so nobody cares about the community anymore. C-level executives and others are just playing a game called: "how can we earn more and not be completely selfish?"

> Musk did it with twitter and it didn't die (I'm not debating quality/financials)

Musk did it to decrease transparency, because bot hunting and similar research was enabled by the API.

> gouge prices

Price gouging is using price changes to gouge you. The prices could get jacked up, but not gouged.

I have used Spotify Audio Features API to display albums and playlist on a radar charts showing acousticness, instrumentalness, energy etc. And to make recomendations (generate playlists) for similiar music based on these charateristics.

It has been fun project but now I am glad that I have never considered making anything serious out of it.

I did this project because my impression is that Spotify had been always trying to steer me not to music that I like but to music that Spotify makes most money of. It had always been paid promotions over user's tastes in music.

And I am not on Spotify anymore for years now. Apple Music have really tasteful recommendations and music curation.

I worked on the Apple Music frontend and can't help but be pleased people are still using it and are pleased. I remember recommendations being a bug priority, but I wasn't involved with that. Spotify's recommendations aren't as bad as they used to be, but it still thinks I'm more into early 2000s emo rock than the kinds of metal I'm actually into.

I use Apple Music over Spotify whenever possible. The Spotify UX has always been, to me, inferior. Thank you for your work!

I'm torn. I've used both, and I find the Apple Music UI generally superior, but the way that Spotify handles music taste prediction, and how it presents that to the user, is quite a lot better than the Apple Music equivalent.

It's funny, I had the opposite experience - Spotify understood my taste while Apple Music didn't. (Specifically, Apple Music pushed a lot more Hip Hop/R&B music than I was used to - this was in early 2016 mind you so things may have changed since).

In my experience with both (currently subscribed to both) Spotify is quicker to extrapolate from less information, and Apple is more patient and observes longer-term patterns. They both eventually get to my tastes, but I can more-rapidly alter the primary genres of my Daily Playlists on Spotify than I can of the various weekly playlists on Apple Music.

I like each for its own reasons, though if I had to choose one forever, I’d probably pick Apple, but it wouldn’t be by a landslide. :)

Had opposite experience with spotify. I used my wife's account one time, and played an hour of nature music. 3 of her daily mixes for the next several months were nature sounds, whale music, etc. No amount of playing other types of music seemed to have any effect. Was getting ready to shut the account down and retry (or move away), but it started to get better.

I regularly do a full data request from them, (and imo everyone should, never know when one day they’ll just delete all your playlists).

Would be cool if I import my detailed listening data from Spotify into Apple Music and basically pre-train their recommendations for me to conclude if it’s better/worse than Spotify’s.

Similar, and recently. Apple Music has some wild ideas of what music I'd like to hear, and if one of my kids plays a song on my account I'm in for the extra special treat of hearing a lot of their music for a while. Even constantly telling Music that I don't like the songs. Spotify has been nearly magic in its ability to predict what I would enjoy listening to.

This, and AM had a horrible penchant to get “stuck” on certain genres/artists, and focus primarily on what I already liked, even when moving to other genres. I did successfully find some new songs I liked, but Spotify had a much better hit/miss ratio, especially with foreign and indie bands.

Apple Music ui is so confusing. It takes so many clicks to favorite a song or to play an album. Idk how people can use it regularly it seems like it’s not designed for creating playlists

Wdym. It takes one click to favorite a song and one click to play an album.

What do you mean because playing an album takes several taps, and favorites are also several taps away in a playlist. Unless you meant recently added? Because in that case it’s easily littered with singles, is only a few recents, and once again it’s more than one tap.

Apple Music UI is atrocious.

While we're thinking of alternatives to Spotify, for years I've been buying albums straight from Bandcamp whenever possible, and HDTracks/etc for artists not on that platform. Then toss up the FLAC/MP3's on my Jellyfin server. I'm pretty sure artists get a lot more of your money that way, and you're not locked into yet another streaming platform that doesn't let you own the actual music files.

I wish there was a way to buy movies this way. I know there’s a rental service but you have to use their hardware.

Drm free digital video purchase doesn't seem to be a thing, but buying DVDs / blu rays and ripping them to a Plex / jellyfin server has gotten pretty approachable.

It's a real shame, I would be happy to buy DRM-free movies digitally, but afaik there is no marketplace for big name films. The studios certainly don't want it and the streaming services removed large demand for it (at least until quite recently).

Fortunately, the physical market still allows for such things. That's my current path. Ripping Blu-rays isn't trivial, requiring specific drives and often replacing the firmware, but once you get it set up it's quite convenient.

Naturally though, the digital piracy framework is much easier and more common, but I still like actually owning my movies.

It is moral (legality is flawed, copyright is a sham, etc) that if you own a piece of media that you can own it in every digital form based on that media. I.e., buy the disk and pirate it to your Jellyfin to avoid the annoyance of ripping the disk. VPNs are cheap and the *arr software suite is quite capable.

Apple Music lets you add your own files and will automatically sync them to the cloud so you can access them on your other devices. Then you get the convenience of streaming but you can also maintain a library of music you own (or “have acquired”, let’s say).

You’ll need to convert FLAC to ALAC with e.g. ffmpeg or XLD, and cloud files played on other devices will be converted to AAC, but it works really well overall.

Does anyone here work at Tidal?

Hi there. Tidal... The only reason I still use Spotify is that your search is quite bad. I would love it to be more fuzzy and include approximate results so I can actually find music in it. I have to be TOO exact/specific when searching for something to actually find it, especially if it's niche music.

I would also like it to be easier to drag music between playlists/search results.

If you fix those 2 things, I will switch. A good search is the only reason Spotify has me hooked.

This is the exact reason I'm using Spotify instead of the Sonos app to control my Sonos speakers.

God Sonos has legitimately the worst UI I've ever seen in my life. Thankfully you can control it through foobar2000, but still

The tidal iOS app is also very frustrating to use.

I’m not sure leaving Spotify is that easy. Here in Europe, everything is on Spotify - even the podcast my language teacher recommends is Spotify only and it’s not like there are good (as in popular enough) alternatives.

Same with music - you don’t want to be the one in the chat group sharing links others can’t play. Green bubble vibes all the way.

Also, Spotify Connect - absolutely unmatched flexibility and reliability to play on other devices.

Another thing I like in Spotify is that you can play over any device connected on the same network, so your phone can control the spotify app on your pc, that’s connected to speakers, for example. Tidal only offers this on dedicated hardware (Tidal Connect), like smart amplifiers and streaming boxes, that I have no need for otherwise. I’d love for this to be fixed.

They don’t even have to be on the same network.

The only reason I don't use Tidal is that they actually removed crossfade playback because it "didn't enhance the consumer experience" - https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/10fr2en/can_you_put_... - which is a deal-breaker for using while running.

have you tried Deezer?

Unrelated if you’re just listening to music, but Deezer recently shut down their API for new registrations completely.

Yeah I pretty much just use tidal's library features. Find albums you like and add em to the library. The search is really bad sometimes. My friends have banned me from being on aux because nobody can find the music they want on my phone lol

Tidal is no better. They closed off access to free users recently, and have never bothered with developing a good API. Spotify has more artist diversity and a much better discovery algorithm. I have used both.

Tidal still has support for DJ software. I know that’s niche, but it matters to me.

Last time I subscribed they also allowed you to easily browse releases by record label, which I've found to be more useful for music discovery than the algorithms of the major services.

This is very sad, and another nudge away from Spotify for me.

I remember the API being a motivator for signing up, and I've hacked together a few toys with it over the years.

Realistically now, the only benefit Spotify provides over my MP3 collection is that it's better organised.

Musicbrainz Picard + PlexAmp is a pretty good solution.

Picard sets _all_ the metadata on the music and PlexAmp uses it to create playlists with the OpenAI API.

Nice, thanks for the rec. I'd seen beets as well which also looks good.

Spotify is definitely the lowest hanging fruit for culling on my subscription list. The API was very much part of the value proposition.

I don't believe it's even that good a deal for artists. I heard the mighty Snoop Dogg makes like USD 40K a year off it or something stupid like that.

Snoop Dogg made USD 40k for one song, which also has multiple songwriters on it. There’s a good breakdown in [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ba0ggi/...

Key phrase from that research:

> I'm not sure how much royalties you can expect when you're one of 17 credited songwriters on one song you don't even own which samples a song that also samples songs...I think $45k is pretty damned good.

> I don't believe it's even that good a deal for artists. I heard the mighty Snoop Dogg makes like USD 40K a year off it or something stupid like that.

What would be the non-stupid amount for Snoop Dogg to make off it?

I also want to add that MetaBrainz (the non-profit foundation that MusicBrainz and Picard are the base of) also have ListenBrainz, a music discovery platform that we built because of similar discontent over the way recommendations were going. Also has the advantage of being free and open-source ! (I work with MetaBrainz)

Why?

Iiuc this is just about APIs for the recommendation engine

It’s never been easier to generate recommendations (eg via LLMs and other routes)

The core functionality otherwise remains unchanged in the API

On the API front, the endpoint that's being killed that was most interesting to me is actually their music analysis one. That was super-nerdy fun to fuck around with, I had a half-finished project on that with an old job. Totally interested in hearing of feature-parity alternatives I can run locally. I'd also thought I'd sometime get around to doing some network analysis with related artists too.

I honestly don't find Spotify's recommendations all that great. I definitely experienced a broadening (perhaps deepening) of my listening early on, but my experience has been that the recommendations are pretty shallow.

I find after throwing together a playlist with some stuff I like, it'll add a few more artists to my mental roster, then nothing. I'll get thrown around in the same loop with the same tunes and artists -- usually from the more famous albums.

I don't want to sound too much like the grouchy aging hipster that I am, but recommendations engines are just one of many ways of discovering music, and I feel like y'know, the old ways were better than just paying some company to do it for me. I'm talking here about being a regular on a local music scene, smoking weed with musicians, trading MP3s on the sneakernet.

Another thing where we just pay some money for "convenience", but are left with some hollow and empty algorithmic imitation of something we once loved.

Your LLM suggestion made me do a little sick in my mouth.

Cool Good to know, I won’t mention it to you again

Maybe you have ondansetron around

The cool thing that's gone now was the "Audio Features" endpoint ( https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... ). You could easily get some important values about every song, now you would probably have to run your own analysis for every song you're interested in. That's a lot harder and slower if you don't want to preprocess every single song available.

yup. The ability to make anything interesting with the Spotify API just got flushed.

So happy I never got started on that little dream project that’s been knocking around the back of my head for a couple years…

Are LLMs actually good at music recommendation?

No, they're absolutely garbage at it. I don't even understand the thought to use LLMs in the first place. And even if they weren't garbage the whole point of a music recommendation algorithm is surface music that wouldn't be in the training set so you need a way to recall likely matches at which point you've built a recommen engine.

> I don't even understand the thought to use LLMs in the first place.

You know how people believe whatever they read, hear, and watch even though it might not be true? Well an LLM is something people read and to get over the hurdle of whether something might be true or good, you simply embrace it and ignore that it could ever be wrong. I don’t get it either as I get upset when I find out a source is mostly wrong.

> Are LLMs actually good at music recommendation?

As far as I can tell, the only thing actually any good at music recommendation is (some) humans.

Spotify's algorithm has worked very well for me in the past.

I'm pretty sure it's not LLM based though, but rather domain specific, or possibly just a simple recommendation engine ("people who like x also often enjoy y").

Not my experience at all, fwiw.

The Apple Music recommendations have been pretty good for me, especially when auto-playing based on a song/playlist.

This is in stark contrast to Spotify, where after a while it would invariably throw in some songs that just did not fit in at all with the rest, and it made for a jarring experience. I've never really had that happen with Apple Music.

I’ve tried apples , agree it does less egregious stuff than Spotify but doesn’t really meet the bar for “good” in my experience. This stuff is probably really dependent on what you are looking for I imagine .

Yeah but didn’t Spotify kill any community features long ago?

YouTubes algorithm (especially before they nerfed it) is often outstanding at it, pulling undiscovered gems that completely match your tastes.

So you're here telling people who were actually using these APIs that we're wrong to be upset, because LLMs? Awesome, super helpful, thanks

LLMs require data, as I'm sure you know. This is locking up what was previously an interesting source of data, which undermines your argument over the long term

Slippery slope fallacy

Can you do anything aside from low-effort shitposting?

Disagreeing with folks on this thread is not shitposting. Please don’t be an asshole and accuse me of “shitposting” merely on account our disagreement.

Great, LLM recommendations. A list that randomly spits out the names of songs that don't exist.

Just what I want in a recommendation engine - to sift through garbage nonsense.

> only benefit Spotify provides over my MP3 collection is that it's better organised.

This seems like pretty low bar.

> Introducing some changes to our Web API

This language won't alarm people except those who know they should care about Web API?

I guess PR people have to be involved.

> Posted November 27, 2024

Isn't the day before Thanksgiving one of the best "Friday news dumps"?

(Americans already traveling, followed by 4-day weekend and family obligations.)

(Though, while bad news might go unnoticed or unexcorciated by many, due to the holiday timing, the timing might've totally ruined the holiday of someone who had a pending "use case", but hadn't yet gotten API approval for it.)

Not sure a Swedish company cares about Thanksgiving.

I'm not sure you can still limit a company to their origin country if they are so international and things like US holidays impact a lot of marketing activities (ad spend, promotions etc.).

Depends, does the Swedish company make more money in Sweden or the USA?

The hostility towards users and developers continues.

I have a fun Spotify web app that gives you an old school jukebox experience. I recently open sourced it as a final act of giving myself and all our users freedom to control our music and music playing experience.

https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab

But I’m laying foundations to move off from Spotify.

Their playback SDKs are buggy and by default always give up control to the recommendation algorithm. APIs get shut down. Developers bugs and questions go unanswered. Trying to control Sonos + Spotify is some sort of cruel prank. Albums and tracks in your collection go dark.

For me I’ve switched to Tidal for streaming which at least for now is does well at the raw basics of playing high quality music. Tunemymusic is good for copying playlists.

Then to Bandcamp for buying dance music to DJ.

I’m very close to buying and ripping CDs again to truly have control.

I am amazed at how many people don't get what is going on.

These companies business models rely on free money economics, and with interest rates up they cannot survive which means all of the growth they targeted is now a huge problem.

Platforms are becoming hostile towards its users because they are quite literally telling you to kick rocks and go elsewhere. They do not want your business because it costs them too much money.

Unfortunately, this breaks a lot of custom python programs I was using to facilitate music discovery and to generate playlists for myself.

It doesn’t affect existing apps

> Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.

Doesn't affect existing apps with extended mode access, for which you have to apply and be approved. Gives you a higher ratelimit so you can ship to production. Plenty of people (me included) build small widgets for themselves without bothering to apply for extended.

> These changes will impact the following Web API applications:

- Existing apps that are still in development mode without a pending extension request

- New apps that are registered on or after today's date

Most people writing small scripts were probably using an API key with development mode.

> Most people writing small scripts were probably using an API key with development mode.

Yep, me included. Since my apps were never meant as anything more than utilities for myself, I never applied for extended access. Nevertheless, I used these tools multiple times a day, especially for sorting and filtering playlists by audio features such as energy and valence. Now, apparently, they will never work again. I'm sure there are plenty of other hobbyists in the same boat.

Even for those that want extended access, what's suppose to be a simple review process is absolutely broken. Their dev forum is full of people who have applied and been left waiting for months with no communication.

Any great discoveries you mightn’t have made otherwise?

Not OP, but also used the API for music discovery, crawling the related artists network from playlists I'd created to find highly connected nodes. I found that strategy was very efficient at filling blind spots in major genres I listened to, and reasonably good at exploring random niches, but generally wasn't the place I found songs that felt truly fresh to me. It felt like it got noticeably worse about 5 years ago, when I perceived them to have ramped up the payola, but that might just be in my head.

Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists.

People are staying on Spotify just because of inertia and because "everyone" is there, not because it's the best at anything any more.

I got spotify a year ago because I needed an easy way to just put on some decent music from a playlist a friend sent me when I had people over. Since then I've realized that basically any song that I want to listen to is on there. Am I missing out on a better experience on some other platform? If so, which one and why is it better?

Sound quality is better and they pay artists more. That's about it.

UI quality is a subjective thing.

> Sound quality is better

According to https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/audio-quality/, you can get 256~320 kbps AAC, which is completely transparent if using a good AAC encoder (FDK or Apple qaac).

I fired Spotify when they signed Rogan to that ridiculous contract, and I switched to Apple Music. Great UX, great audio quality. Not prefect, but better than what I left behind.

It never was. The idea of using a limited catalog as the sole source of my music content is like assuming Netflix is all you need on a TV.

How can you say that? Spotify held a moment early on where it was built upon pirated mp3s. At that time it was the easy way to listen to anything for free.

I remember the time where there was no party without constant Spotify ads running over the speaker, that's the only type of free account I know of.

Other than that my point was how incomplete it is and always was. It could be nice as additional catalogue to my music, but for me it's missing to many of my favourite songs to use it as main driver.

Edit:// in Switzerland downloading music for private use is no crime. So the initial situation was different I guess.

Spotify is from Sweden, not Switzerland.

And they didn't start with illegal MP3s. They did have an ad-supported free tier from the start though. But it was not illegal. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

I think it's napster you're thinking of. That was an illegal sharing platform and now a mediocre paid service.

It might be Grooveshark that they're thinking of, it was notorious for quickly reuploading content that was taken down by DMCA requests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark

Were the claims made in 2017 shown to be false? I haven't yet read the book - how widely accessible was the beta?

https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4136/Spotify-TeardownInsid...

No idea where Spotify is from. My point was we didn't need it here in Switzerland as much as collecting music from the internet was a normal and legal thing long before that.

Apple Music has a ton of smaller/niche artists and songs that other streamers refuse to pay for. I’ve never found anything missing.

Citation needed.

I think you're thinking of Grooveshark.

I miss Grooveshark :)

I stay on Spotify because it has an open source client spotify-qt.

I use Firefox on BSD which doesn't have DRM support so the web versions of Apple Music and Deezer don't work properly. On Apple it only plays the first 30 seconds of each song and I forget what the problem was with Deezer.

Also a real app is way nicer than a web interface of course. And with libspotify I can even change songs that play on my mobile and control it through home assistant.

None of the others allow third party clients or open source. Sure it's a niche reason but this is the reason I'm on Spotify and not somewhere else. I've tried other platforms for a month but it was crap.

I only listen to big artists anyway that are well compensated.

Using Apple Music on Linux is a real pain point too. The web player is pretty decent in theory and I would be happy with it, except almost every time I open it I'm logged out even though I checked the "Remember me" and "Trust this browser" options, and last used the app only a few hours ago/on the previous day.

Having to go through the iPhone two factor dance every time I want to just play music is so annoying that it's made me consider going back to Spotify.

Spotify deprecated libspotify years ago and all current clients are using some unsupported reverse engineered client implementation or web APIs.

Use play.qobuz.com in Firefox. It will even send the correct samplerate to pipewire which can auto switch your dac to it if you’ve enabled it in pipewire config

Spotify pays 70% of their revenue to music rights holders.

Which is much less than Apple and Tidal.

Tidal is in a downwards spiral because they are running out of money, Apple subsidisies Apple Music with profits from other parts of the company.

The pot splitting model Spotify uses is definitely not good but the major labels are the ones with all the power, without pot splitting they wouldn't accept licencing to Spotify because they would make less money.

At every filthy corner of the music industry you'll find a very sore spot: the big 4 labels control this industry. From fucking with artists where contracts requiring artists to pay back all "marketing and fees" before any royalties are distributed, royalties split usually 80:20 or 70:30 for label:artist, forcing artists to make their songs viral before they can be released (without much marketing support from the labels, the only reason they exist).

It's a passion industry, and just like any other passion industry it's fraught with exploitation. Just look at game development, underpaid, overworked, because there's always someone else with passion to make a game.

How is any of that relevant when Apple Music pays artists much more than Spotify?

They subsidise that from other parts of the business though.

Also they don't technically pay artists aside from the self-released ones, most artists with bigger payouts aren't self-released so Apple Music just like Spotify is filling major labels coffers more than the artists' pockets

That's all relevant on the comparison of why Apple Music can pay more than Spotify, unsure what you didn't get but willing to clarify.

> Apple subsidisies Apple Music with profits from other parts of the company.

No evidence of this and it doesn't even make sense.

EU would have a field day with it and Apple likes making money wherever it can find it.

> No evidence of this and it doesn't even make sense.

How doesn't it make sense? Apple Music has fewer paying subscribers than Spotify, Apple Music prices just like Spotify's prices vary per market, Spotify pays out 70% of revenue to royalties but Apple Music is able to pay much more per stream even though it has fewer subscribers.

Now think: where does the money to cover Apple Music paying royalties comes from? If they pay double what Spotify pay and Spotify is spending 70% of revenue on royalties, how can Apple Music pay double without costing double? Something has to cover, Apple Music is a loss leader product.

> EU would have a field day with it and Apple likes making money wherever it can find it.

Apple is making money through its aggregated services (iCloud + TV+ + Apple Music), if Apple Music is a loss leader but makes people contract the bundle which is a money maker for Apple, they will lose money on Music.

> How doesn't it make sense? Apple Music has fewer paying subscribers than Spotify, Apple Music prices just like Spotify's prices vary per market, Spotify pays out 70% of revenue to royalties but Apple Music is able to pay much more per stream even though it has fewer subscribers.

Because streaming platform do not pay per stream making pay per stream a meaningless metric.

Spotify has ~half of its users using the free tier (with ads) and the other half are subscribers. On average a subscriber generates waaaaay more revenue than free users ( this is visible in Spotify's financial results). Apple does not have a "free" version. If Spotify were to simply abandon their free version and became paying subscribers only like Apple, pay per stream would almost double but at the end of the month, artists (and Spotify) would get less money. Which is preferable ? More money at the end of the month or higher pay-per-stream ?

On top of that music streaming is very seasonal (total music consumption varies by month) so pay-per-stream is not even a stable metric.

What are the numbers?

https://www.loudersound.com/features/which-music-streaming-s...

So?

Their pro-rata model is a joke. It's designed to favor big labels who btw are also shareholders of Spotify.

For those who don't know, the money of subscriptions goes into a big pot and then it's distributed based on the total number of plays. Which means the subscription I'm paying, for the most part, doesn't go to the artists I listen to but instead goes to the big labels who represent popular artists.

It's as if, back when people bought physical records, Madonna got money when you bought a record from some indie band.

Since all of the money first goes to Spotify, what's the difference between directly play-to-artist vs. play-to-pot then to artist?

We both pay $10 a month. This month, I listen to 99 songs from a single artist, and you listen to one song total. $9.90 of my money goes to my artist, and $0.10 goes to your artist. $9.90 of your money goes to my artist, and $0.10 goes to your artist

$10 of my money goes to Spotify, and $10 of your money goes to Spotify. Then Spotify pays artists based (somehow) on how many times their songs played.

$19.80 goes to one artist, and $0.20 to the other. 99:1.

edit: Maybe what you're getting at is that the person who listened to only one song should pay 99x less. Then it really would be pay-per-play. But Spotify is a subscription service. What else should they do with my extra $9.90? Send it all to the one artist? That would be interesting... but then what if I don't listen to any songs in the month? Bank it and send it to the spread for the following month?

I think the more important point here is that the popular artists supported by big labels become black holes, sucking in all the money. It doesn't matter that you, and all your friends, and all your friends' friends, all listen to the same 3 niche artists day in, day out - approximately all of yours and theirs money will go to some pop artists none of you ever listen to, simply because that's what a much larger general population listens to.

So, it's like 99:1 ratio, but 99 side is Lady Gaga and friends, and 1 is all the indies and niche artist around the world together.

This exactly.

Before streaming with pro-rata royalties, when you bought a record, some money went to the artist of the record (after distribution cuts etc).

Of course Spotify doesn't care. They have to give up 70% of their revenue anyway. But the distribution of this money is the important part and of course pro-rata benefits big labels who have control over the catalog on Spotify and are shareholders.

Which she likely did, as from my understanding owning the inventory is standard for music stores, so due to the higher demand it’s more likely the bulk of your money would go to buying Madonna records than buying The Smiths.

That's why they were bitching about nature sounds and white noise eating into their money. A lot of people listen to an hour of music during the day then listen to 8 hours of rain while they sleep.

Never tried Tidal. What makes it better?

I refuse to use anything Apple out of principle.

Better artist payouts, clean layout, no podcast pushing, higher quality audio, emphasis on credits so there's more discoverability based on writers and producers.

Slightly lower price for the same catalog size.

Worse ui and integration slight better discovery

Interesting, I find the UI to be better than Spotify. Not good, but better.

For Spotify, which I’ve been a paid subscriber from basically day one, the UI went downhill from incredibly great (I do have fond memories of the first client in Qt) to a total mess without any consistency.

Tidal is just a stagnant mess. Apple Music is not better.

I guess we are just suffering from the fact that UI are not made anymore to be useful but to influence customers behaviors.

Yes all these ui appear to be designed to create the appearance of usefulness but to frustrate the customer when they try to use the service in any way that does not result in the lowest fees.

> out of principle

I would assume that people with 'principles' would not use any of these subscription companies.

"Principles" are highly subjective. They're rooted in identity, and identity varies wildly across humanity.

Apple Music has more live radio streams featuring artists too, and the Apple Music 1 radio features real live commentators. Whoever is at the controls for Music over at Apple is someone who really cares about music.

It's Zane Lowe who was a highly respected music presenter in the UK.

He's very knowledgable about music, great interviewer and seems to be in his element.

Also Apple Music and Tidal have high bit-rate, lossless audio.

Once you've tried it there's no turning back.

And classical music gets proper special treatment!

People have been begging for that for ages on Spotify’s forum…

> Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists.

Seems like Apple pays 3x what Spotify pays? It can't be as simple as that though.

Spotify has a free tier, which pays way less since it's ad-supported. Apple Music is pay only (with only a 3 month free trial)

Tidal operates at a loss of something like $xx-xxx million a year. Who cares if it pays artists more if its not even successful.

All they are really doing is using VC money to pay artists a lil bit more to seem more enticing.

Well, as long as I’ve got my music, it’ll be a good deal to me.

I mean, respectfully, I really don’t care about their profitability if : 1) I get to pay reasonable price 2) artists are paid a reasonable prices 3) VCs are ok to throw money at it for any reason.

On the current state of affairs, everyone is happy (or at least happier than Spotify).

Is it future proof ? Probably not, but it’s a little more present proof than Spotify.

If someday this equation changes or the company collapses, well, I’ll just go elsewhere.

And if the industry is not capable in itself to handle the use case of paying a monthly fee to be able to listen to music while remunerating artists, given that humanity in general never paid as much money just for music in the whole human history, it would just mean that they are incredibly stupid and that they deserve the piracy.

So did Spotify. It's the usual VC funded startup scam.

At least a new player means artists and users are slightly more screwed over than before, until this batch of VC money runs dry.

Fortunately, unlike with e.g. Uber or Grubhub & similar, the music streaming startups aren't screwing society over by destroying more sustainable local competition, so I think in this case, the best course of action is to make full use of all the freebies and best deals in this space, because the more VC money we burn, the better off we (users) and artists are.

It'll eventually collapse, too, but there won't be a fallout, since all those companies do right now is compete with each other over distribution rights. The songs won't go away.

I stay on Spotify because Tidal's search is bad. Whenever I fire it up and search for music I literally have to type the full artist name sometimes. If I'm off by 1 letter it will often not find the song for me. This is especially true when not searching for particularly unpopular tracks. I would have switched to Tidal ages ago if I could actually find music when I wanted it.

>Apple Music and Tidal play multiple times more to artists.

You mean labels and distributors, the money goes through a lot of people before the artists see any of it.

Actually Tidal has a partly direct to artist model, while Apple pays all labels the top-line rate instead of forcing smaller ones to accept less.

I don't use Apple Music because Spotify has an app on everything i want. All OSs, even consoles.

I'd switch to Apple in a heartbeat if it had a good client for Linux.

As I already posted to the growing thread of discontent at https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Chan... this is Spotify's usual deprecation strategy and they've done this before to their APIs. I think it's usually due to incompetence but this time that feels like only half the story. Sadly, despite their frequent self-sabotage, they still have the best API by a million miles.

Anyway, anyone with a private project that doesn't mind a manual step, can grab an access token from https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token using their browser. There's also projects like librespot (and various ports) which can provide access programmatically[0] using Spotify's client ID. Oauth is useless at preventing this kind of access.

[0] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options#acce...).

YouTube Music basically doesn't have an API. I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving.

Someone should do API music, you just get an API token and the API documentation. Having the ability to use something like old-school xmms with an API integration to a streaming service would be amazing.

> I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving.

Three aspects: ad blocking, fraud prevention and DRM. Of course all platforms have their internal APIs but if they were to become too public you'd instantly see "artists" artificially bumping up their listener ratios for higher payouts, you'd see people developing third party clients (or patches to first party clients) to evade advertising, and you'd see people just blatantly ripping the catalogue.

Of course all of these things happen at the moment already, but the scope is limited for now. Security by obfuscation is not true security, but at least a (massive) impedance.

If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue. As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter, If I pay $20 per month and play Taylor Swift 24/7 she'd get 100% of the money, minus the 10-20% to run the service, so that's attempting to pump up your own numbers would cause be a money losing exercise.

DRM, yeah okay, valid reason.

> If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue.

IIRC, at least Netflix and Spotify have a "pay less, but get some ads" tiers, and YouTube doesn't want SponsorBlock et al to impact the golden geese too much.

> As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter

People have scammed streaming services for millions of dollars [1]. Sure, at their scale it's peanuts, but still eyewatering sums of money for normal people.

[1] https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-ai/the-10-million-spotify-s...

Apple Music have an API, by technicality. It's mostly read only, only really works in client side JS, uses their own proprietary authentication rather than OAuth, mostly readonly with the only exception of being able to create playlists for a user, and then add songs to a playlist

Godspeed to all the OSS Adversarial Interoperability reverse engineers! APIs should be a digital human right.

De-enshittify by any means necessary!

Companies are going to continue to enshittify as long as customers refuse to leave them. There's no incentive not to.

People who want to do stuff like making custom apps or scripts that use these APIs should instead be building their own music servers.

PlexAMP is awesome

And when one is building this kind of a music server, please support your favourite artists!

Ideally, if they have a Bandcamp or something similar, where you can directly buy their tracks and albums from them, do that. Usually this means that you can get access to high-quality FLACs and whatnot, but it will also mean that more money will go directly to the artists (usually money going to the record label and whatnot is unavoidable even with this, but there will still be fewer people in the middle).

And well, if that's not a thing, then at least try to buy the tracks from somewhere, so that they at least see some return on their efforts. Maybe physical CDs and the like. The point is just to be able to support your favourite artists!

Your suggestions are fine, but if you really want to support your favorite musicians, you should attend their concerts and buy merchandise there. They personally get far more profit from ticket sales and merch sales than from selling music directly. And of course, the concert experience is something way beyond just listening to a track from Bandcamp or a CD.

Of course that depends somewhat on the venue and the cut they take of ticket and merch sales too.

Uhm, is that actually true? How is the $10 I spend on a digital album on Bandcamp not 90%+ profit for the band? Sure, maybe the overpriced T-shirt has a bit more profit as a raw number, but realistically, I'm going to buy a band's merch the one time I see them every 3-5 years (assuming they stay together and tour for that long). If they release music more frequently, I would suspect buying a digital album is more sustainable long term.

I think this is also why you see bands like Weezer releasing more niche EPs/LPs. Heck, look at jam bands like Phish or Dave Matthews who release every single live show online as a separate album for fans to also buy to relive the experience they had at a particular show. The hardcore fans will buy the music, so it's in the band's best interest to "keep shipping" and record as much as possible.

This is a myth unfortunately. Unless you are a really big name artist - or a mod-level or above artist doing a show in your home town - the economics of live and touring for most musicians mean they are more likely to lose money than make money.

Imagine a band with four or five members doing a 20 date tour in 1000 cap venues where tickets are $40 each. Maths looks good, right? $40,000 a night! $800k for the tour, and then you can sell a bunch of merch an easily make $1 million. Great!

No.

A touring band might sell out every night of the tour but more likely it’s going to be 70-80% occupancy. So let’s call it 75%. Suddenly that $800k drops to $600k.

But then you need to pay the venue/promoter a big chunk of that. Depending on what the promoter is providing that could be as much as 40-50%

Let’s go with a conservative 40%.

You’re down to $360k now.

But you’ve still got to pay all the costs of the tour.

A 20 date tour probably means 25 days on the road, at least.

A tour bus that could fit 4 or 5 people plus tour manager (yes, you need one) and a tech/roadie/sound engineer to get the set up right in each venue (let’s say you’ve got one person who can do all of this) is going to cost $1500 a day for the vehicle. Add in mileage, which is often about $5+ per mile. So that 20 date tour with 25 days on the road, and 4000 miles (coast to coast) will cost you maybe $57.5k for the tour bus and driver and mileage. (Gas, insurance etc are covered by the per mile charges that tour bus operators charge). You’re going to need to park the tour bus during the day. That’s maybe $200 a day. More in some cities.

You’re down to $300k now.

But wait - no one has been paid yet!

The tour manager will easily cost $450 per day or more - and there will be days require for planning (“advancing”) the tour and wrap up days. So the 25 date tour might need 5 days advancing and two days post-tour admin. That’s $14400, so call it $15k.

Your technician will cost about the same. Maybe less, but you want someone who can do three things, so let’s call your manager plus tech/sound engineer $30k.

We are down to $240k now.

At this point it’s worth mentioning that the artist’s manager and billing agent commission on the “gross” - the entire amount the artist gets before costs - the $360k fee from tickets after the promoter’s share. Those commissions are typically 20% to manager and 15% to agent. So we need to deduct another $126k.

That gives $114k left.

None of the band members have been paid yet.

But, also, they need a support act for each show. If each support act gets $500 then that’s another $10k gone. $104k left.

Everyone needs a per diem! 7 people on the road, plus driver. They all need coffees, water, laundry, dry cleaning, gym passes, cough medicine, whatever, plus a “buy-out” for meals. So let’s make sure everyone has $60 a day for the buy-out and another $20 for incidentals. $16k. $88k left.

The tour - and all the gear - hasn’t been insured yet, and the band and crew don’t have insurance for medical emergencies while touring. Let’s say that’s going to cost another $3k total.

And then everyone needs flights and cabs at the end of the tour to get home. They’ll have excess luggage and instruments. So let’s call that $1500 each. Another $10k.

That’s means there’s $75k left.

The band needs to rehearse and build their live show. So that’s probably a couple of weeks rehearsal, planning, etc. So that’s a 40 day commitment.

Five people, 40 days, $75k. Each band member walks away with $15k - or $375 a day.

But how often are you going be doing a tour of that scale? Once a year probably. And touring is gruelling.

If you’re playing bigger venues with higher ticket prices there is more money - but costs can also scale.

To make $75k from bandcamp you need to sell maybe 10,000 $10 albums.

To make $75k from streaming you’d need maybe 18-20 million streams.

And you can do that without the crippling costs of touring.

Sure, if you’re on a label you’re going to get a lot less.

But touring isn’t a magic money tree, and it’s hard work.

Counter point, from a small touring punk band, Direct Hit!: You Don't Have to Lose Money on Tour https://www.vice.com/en/article/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-...

Have you ever heard of Direct Hit!? I think they squarely fit in the mid-level or below.

1. The article is from 2014.

2. The band sold a total of $4k in tickets. If tickets were $10 then that’s 400 tickets. So roughly 10 people per show.

3. They apparently own their own van.

4. They slept on people’s floors and couches.

5. They apparently didn’t eat or drink.

6. They didn’t insure the tour or their gear.

7. There was no contingency for emergencies.

8. They presumably booked the tour themselves and self manage (which might explain why they are playing to ten people at a time)

9. According to Wikipedia the band has five members.

10. Their 37 day tour grossed $8598 with costs of $3096.

And still, their take for the tour was $5502. For a 37 day tour. For a band with five members.

That’s a grand total of $30 a day.

So in reality this tour cost them whatever their daily living costs are, less $30.

I don’t know what living costs are like in Milwaukee - nor what they were like in 2014 - but let’s assume that the band members are all single and happy to live a relatively basic life and need $30,000 each per year to cover their costs.

That’s $82 a day each. So between them to survive 37 days they need a total of $15170

So they lost $10k on this tour.

They would have been better off giving 1000 people $10 to buy their album on bandcamp.

Even the 75K is super optimistic. If you are touring you want to bring your own equipment, much easier to run a show that is roughly the same in multiple places then relying on the house rig in multiple venues. Once you factor in bringing your own gear (Almost definitely rented, sound is expensive, lighting even more so), you now need to factor in maintenance of the equipment and rigging.

Also the assumption you can get one guy to do lighting and sound is pretty unrealistic unless your show consists of a static wash throughout the entire show. Theatrical shows you can get away with it, but that's usually because the man hours are heavily front loaded into pre-production, but with live music you will need a dedicated LX Tech and a dedicated Sound Engineer.

I moonlight as a lighting technician during the evenings and weekends, mainly working in handful small local venues, there's me running lighting and the sound engineer doing his thing. The bands playing are easily spending £300 a night just on 2 people (And this is a small venue probably about 200 cap in the main hall), youd be spending much more for a touring crew

I was deliberately being quite broad brush otherwise you have to go down too many rabbit holes. But I agree absolutely with what you are saying. Some of these costs are examples form actual touring budgets and others are slightly hand-wavy.

Quite likely an artist of this scale would not even break even touring and would hope (ha!) to make up the difference on merch. But of course merchandise is not pure profit, you have to lug it around on the road, and it’s a sunk cost that requires upfront investment.

But my main point was to counter the fallacy that artists make loads of money from touring. People with no experience of the music industry don’t understand the promoter/artist split or the agent and magnet commissions. They realise that probably the artist isn’t getting 100% of the ticket sales but they don’t realise that their share - before their costs - might only be 35-40%.

>Companies are going to continue to enshittify as long as customers refuse to leave them.

True but—

Also going to remain the case as long as customers refuse to pay for things they appreciate

> De-enshittify by any means necessary!

Damn straight! https://blog.metabrainz.org/2024/11/28/pissed-off-by-spotify...

Spotify recently reported record profits, but at what cost?

After raising prices, cutting payouts to artists, and laying off a significant number of employees, Spotify managed to post a $499M profit.

It just doesn’t sit right with me when a company thriving financially decides to cut jobs and squeeze artists even further.

The only thing that’s kept me on Spotify is the family plan—I didn’t want the hassle of setting things up again for my elderly parents. But the prices have shot up fast.

Here’s a comparison of current family plans:

* Spotify: $19.99 (for 6 people)

* Pandora: $17.99 (for 6 people)

* Apple Music: $16.99 (for 5 people)

I remember when I first signed up, the Spotify family plan was just $12.99. Hard to believe how much it’s increased in just a few years.

Recent News

* Spotify Rakes in $499M Profit After Lowering Artist Royalties Using Bundling Strategy | Headphonesty || https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/11/spotify-reports-499m-op...

* Spotify to lay off 17% of employees — read the full memo CEO Daniel Ek sent to staff members || https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/spotify-lay-17-employ...

Ah damn, that sucks. Just recently someone improved the HomeAssistant integration and added lots more song data, and I see that it stopped working for me because of this (my api key was in development mode)

Remember: FLAC files don't lose API endpoints.

"Physical books don't run out of battery" type energy.

Flac files have most of the benefits of streaming, whereas physical books are a lot less like digital books. You can instantly purchase and download flac files, sync them across devices, play them over networks, duplicate them, hold thousands of them on your phone, etc.

Also I can shrink my FLACs into 256kbps OPUS and store ~9 hours of audio in 1GB. I cannot (easily) shrink my physical books into microfilm and read them.

The better comparison is PDF + OCR’d text VS Kindle.

An aside: for stereo audio, even 128kbps OPUS is probably overkill[1].

[1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings

OPUS is great for low-bandwidth situation. The best.

But it is lossy, and thus not a good archival format.

At some point, there'll be better lossy formats than OPUS, and then we'll need the lossless source again.

They also don't only cost $12/mo for access to pretty much everything I'd ever want to listen to.

Is that $12/mo truly worth it? I mean, do you find 13+ new songs you genuinely enjoy every month? And would the alternative media be so expensive that you couldn’t build your library using that $12/mo, over a reasonable period of time? I know for me that it’s not worth it, I can buy 3-4 CDs for that $12, even less if I find some good deals, and I’ve had better luck finding new music at the Goodwill than I have with Spotify.

> buy 3-4 CDs

I'd wager that there's a good number of people that don't even own a CD player anymore. $12/month to have music to listen to, even if I don't have new tracks pushed on to me, seems like a reasonable deal to me to not have to deal with the hassle of hosting it on my own server and, what, ripping my CDs to mp3s? If a friend comes in and wants to hear something, Spotify is more likely to have it than my local mp3 collection.

Owning your music files doesn't necessarily imply that you have to by them physically on CDs. Of course the music you are interested in might not be available in your preferred format or on your preferred streaming platform.

Yes, and it’s a shame people have abandoned physical media. Who said you had to host it though? You can also simply keep them on your phone. 1GB of storage comes out to around 20 hours of 128kbps OPUS, which will sound identical to Spotify’s offerings, and takes all of a few minutes to rip the disk, have a program automatically tag the metadata, and convert every song to OPUS. It’s also more likely that your friend will find their music on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you should get YouTube Premium.

Yes, are you crazy? 12 songs is such a low bar I find at least 12 new artists every month. The music scene is so huge that tiny niches in relative terms can get sustainable followings. I just went to a sold-out show last week where the headliner had 50k monthly listeners.

Did you just decide on your 30th birthday that you aren't allowed to listen to new music anymore? I can't even imagine listening to the same music collection on repeat forever.

Crazy? Maybe, but I also know that within my anecdotal data Spotify prefers to show you popular artists and/or songs you are already familiar with, making finding new niche artists a struggle for me. And most people will stay within what Spotify recommends them, meaning they are, in my experience, barely reaching the 12 new songs/mo minimum. I also have found that yes, most people do decide to stop finding new music as they get older. It’s very common for people to both overstate their desire for new media and to simultaneously slow down their intake of new media over time.

Me and you are both at least one to two standard deviations above the mean in terms of artist acquisition rates. And Spotify hasn’t been able to help me with music acquisition as much as exploring physical music selections or Discogs, BandCamp, or eBay has, and in those cases I end up with higher quality listening experience as well.

That seems expensive. Are you storing your FLACs in AWS Glacier? If so, you're doing it wrong.

e.g. mine are in a well backed up filesystem, reachable from anywhere in the world via my tailscale network.

Typically mounted read-only on whatever computer I am using, at definitely less than $12/mo.

In contrast, Spotify doesn't even have much of the music I listen to.

FLAC also doesn't give you the information these google'd API's did.

My bicycle won't run out of gas but that doesn't mean it's more useful/reliable than my car for a cross country road trip

What if I told you, FLAC supports metadata?

That way, you can have the information you need w/o being tracked.

I think my comment laid out the problem very clearly. You need a _source_ for the information, not a place to persist it.

Do you have a solution for how to cheaply extract features from songs? If yes, I'd love to hear about it, but if not, your evangelism and impotent attempts to defend it are not productive to this conversation.

Ever since they decided to spend hundreds of millions on Rogan whilst also gouging artists, I've been looking for an alternative to Spotify.

This might be the push I needed.

Spotify siphons yet more income artists should be getting into corporate coffers and Daniel Ek's bank account.

No music lover should be using Spotify. They are notorious for driving the downward trend in streaming payments to artists. They are arguably worse than the worst of the old Music Industry we were taught to hate in "tech disruptor culture 1.0".

Bandcamp revenue goes straight to artists, largely. I got 89 out of 99 dollars paid on a release of mine.

Good to point out and I’m with you but… fwiw…

I think the intersection of people that are upset about a free recommendation API being cancelled and people who want a music platform that pays artists fairly is essentially zero.

So yeah

> arguably worse than the worst of the old <insert industry> we were taught to hate in "tech disruptor culture 1.0"

Always has been (meme)

Whatever happened to "app fairness"? Oh, right -- Fairness For Me, Not For Thee.

If I had bought a CD every 2nd month for 10 years I would have had 60 albums. That is about what Spotify costs.

Spotify has been making the music field even more winner takes it all than the old status quo.

The economics of the music industry were always heavily tilted to the record labels, but Spotify somehow took it even further. Their CEO is a billionnaire for what? Being an unprofitable middle-man that pays $1 to the labels for every $0.80 they get?

It pays US$0.70 for every US$1 it gets, it's in their financial reports quite easily to see.

Did you honestly buy music so infrequently, or did I buy music more than the normal person? In high school, I'd buy an album/CD a week. That wasn't just new releases but also meant including back catalog to fill in the collection.

Are we just opposite ends of the music acquisition spectrum?

Even a CD every other month sounds high to me, buying a CD a week sounds insane to me, where would you even put them all? I owned like... 6 CDs total before I started downloading MP3s. I would just listen to the radio. My friends were the same, they only owned albums from their very favorite bands.

Singles were a thing though. I think they were priced at like a fifth of an album?

And took up exactly the same amount of space.

Generational differences I guess. MP3s did not become a thing until way after I was out of college. I used my weekly lunch allowance to buy a CD for that week. Most CDs of back catalog content was $9-$15. The >$20 prices weren't that common for typical releases. Of course some special release with multiple discs were priced higher.

Where did I put them? I just had stacks of them like everyone else. Now, they are just in boxes labeled CDs. Most of the time, they were in a CD player in the car, in the disc changers, in the Walkman, etc. Lots of people would toss the case, and put the disc/liners in a flip book to reduce space.

When you are into music, you deal with it. Like drummers. Where would you even put the drum set? What a silly question honestly.

My generation didn't buy CDs. It was all mp3. I think the shift was when I reached CD buying age at 14.

I tried to compare the sub fee with how many CDs you would end up with.

Judging by my parents and friends parents about 40-80 CDs seemed like a common size of the music collection among people that had a collection, that propably had been growing for 20 years since mid 80s.

I also argue that video rental stores were way more value than todays streaming subscription.

We would maybe rent two films a week, they probably cost £5 for the pair.

That's £20 per month for 8 movies? Not sure that's better value than Netflix.

It's not. Just typical nostalgia falsifying people's memories. My autism doesn't stand for it.

CDs were 20-30 euro. A complete fucking rip off. No highschool kid could afford buying one every week unless they had wealthy parents. DVD box sets of TV shows? Just thinking about it makes my blood boil so I'll leave it there.

I for one welcome our Netflix and Spotify overlords.

You guys must have had some heavy import duties or something. I was buying $9/CD for the older releases and $19.99 for new releases. My parents gave me $20/week for lunch, and I'd skip lunch and save that money to buy a new CD at the end of the week. My parents were far from wealthy.

Once I got into electronic music, things did get a bit more expensive because of the damn "import" stickers coming out of Europe.

Was your generation the same generation that never paid for any of those mp3s? Even when Napster/Limewire hit, it just never sat well with me the out right flagrant stealing going on. It was no less shocking to me than the groups flagrantly walking into stores and ripping them off. Of course people will counter with whatever reasons they used as excuses (I've heard them all). At the height of "mp3 trading", I knew many artists whose music was being distributed on these platforms that never saw a dime. Bandcamp is the closest to the ideal thing that I can imagine where fans/artist can exchange directly without a label ripping off the artists especially now that artists do not have to depend on studio time.

Spotify pays 70% of revenue to music rights holders.

They aren't profitable.

Small bands can't have fans revenue from recordings in the same way as before, since they share pot with Tailor Swift and bot farms.

It doesn't matter if its 70 or 99.99%.

Spotify is a way to get famous. It's not meant to make big money.

Once you are famous you can go on festivals. That's how streaming works in my country. When enough people know your songs you can get 5k people to show up at your live gig.

It sucks for the autistic artists who want to make music in his basement I guess.

They are: https://www.statista.com/chart/26773/profitability-developme...

Maybe, for the first time ever.

Though historically when Spotify has come close to making a profit, record labels see it as an opportunity to demand more or pull out.

Many companies, for example, Amazon during its rise to power, will choose to not profit and instead reinvest in business growth and avoid tax. When there is profit, there is more tax; As i understand it, if all the revenue is allocated to expenses, it will benefit from large tax exemptions. It's sort of like running a for-profit entity as if it were a non-profit entity, though by choice and not mandate.

Selling music itself pretty much never benefits anyone in a significant way outside the top 1% of bands/whatever pop music.

This is why any touring band asks you to buy merch, they eat on the money from merch

How has Bandcamp been after the last acquisition for the artists? We (end users) were all predicting its downfall, but so far the new owners haven't done anything especially egregious yet, other than laying off a bunch of staff.

I've still got my hand on the trigger waiting to download my entire library as lossless FLAC and jump ship, but so far it seems like it's been mostly business as usual.

I'll open by saying that I've bought about 50 albums from bandcamp and qobuz this year, so broadly, I'm with you about supporting artists.

However, the whole "Spotify is terrible for artists" argument seems ill considered. Terrible compared to what? I lot of what I buy is relatively niche artists on relatively niche labels, who would never have been signed to a major and would never had had international distribution. These artists can't make a living through streaming, sure, but I don't think they could have made a living in the old world, either.

I still have a Spotify subscription - mostly for the family - but I use it to listen to albums before deciding to buy them. I'd buy a lot less if I couldn't vet it on Spotify first.

A lot of artists seem to think that they're entitled to make a living off their art, which seems to me to completely misunderstand the history of the music industry.

> A lot of artists seem to think that they're entitled to make a living off their art, which seems to me to completely misunderstand the history of the music industry.

Or just the history of value in general. People definitely love music and will pay for it, but not for everyone who makes music.

If you don't want to abolish copyright you can't call yourself a hacker. Why should artists be a protected class?

That's very sad. The api had some cool stuff. I used to hack with it during COVID, and build e.g. https://tunemeet.com.

It generally seemed like they encouraged third-party apps, and I have heard that also used to be the culture inside Spotify, but I guess that's no more.

>Algorithmic and Spotify-owned editorial playlists

Any guesses if this includes New Releases and Discover Weekly playlists?

It looks like Discover Weekly is not longer accessible. Trying to get it by ID returns a 404 and searching or getting playlists returns a list with a null value where I expect the playlist to be.

Are any alternative APIs (non Spotify) available for the functionality being deprecated in this notice?

Not any good ones unfortunately! Great opportunity for someone to make one while other platforms are still scrapeable.

You don’t need to scrape other platforms. LLMs are already probably pretty darn good at this.

Can LLMs analyze song features (danceability, instrumentalness, speechiness, tempo)?

Audio analysis is one of the easiest problems that ML can deal with. The problem is, how can you use a pretrained LLM for discovering newly-released music? And how do you train future models without a source of new data?

> Audio analysis is one of the easiest problems that ML can deal with.

Maybe, but that doesn’t tell me anything about LLMs. I’m not saying that it’s a particularly hard problem, I’m surprised that an LLM specifically would be good for this purpose.

Yeah, there seems to be an unfortunate trend towards using "LLM" when people really mean "transformer."

Music recommendations is a fools errand, I’ve never experienced or heard of a system consistently recommending it well. From my experience it’s 50:50, when it’s good it’s good then half the other time it’s Ed Sheeran

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42266735

https://blog.metabrainz.org/2024/11/28/pissed-off-by-spotify...

Apple Music's API still going strong. I use it my minimal, "just the good parts" alternative Apple Music client: https://shelf.fm https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shelf-fm/id1520498918

Unfortunate. I love https://www.chosic.com/ to discover new music that uses the Spotify Web API.

While this update claims it's for new apps, if there's anything we've learned from Twitter, Reddit, etc. is that they will eventually kill all third-party apps.

The official app doesn't even have a way to hide all podcasts for good, you have to click "music" at the top every single time you use the app, and now this, never-ending enshitifficattion.

If your third-party product/service at the mercy of this Web API access already has the access entitlement it needs, is this move to restrict API access for others a gift that reduces upstart competitor threats to you?

And the new market, selling API key for access to legacy Spotify APIs! Enquire within

It's the new acquihire: acquiAPIentitlementmire.

One of the gratest Spotify tools is : https://everynoise.com/#otherthings

I hope they will long live

Spotify api also requires extension requests now. The review process takes 10+ weeks and has no discourse :(

> with the aim of creating a more secure platform.

What a bullshit... this is an abuse of the language.

> As we continue to review the experience provided on Spotify for Developers, we've decided to roll out a number of measures with the aim of creating a more secure platform.

I'm sorry but more secure platform to what extent exactly?

They're breaking tooling because someone might know what I'm listening to? This is so frustrating along with getting a Spotify update almost every morning.

Resurrect spotifynewmusic.com. Please !!!

Note: this was a playlist s publisher, based on the recommendations of the good music news website.

Jlarome, if you read that, publish the code. PLEASE !!!

'We analyzed the data and concluded that our users get too much value out of our service. We're left with no other choice than to shut down the services which were causing value leaks.'

Long time ago, spotify allowed us to create, modify our playlists through end points. Now, it's impossible.

When did this stop being supported by Spotify?

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

I think you are talking about "Get Featured Playlists", which is more geared towards Spotify created playlists, which is under the 'Browse' tab in Spotify.

Welcome to our AI-powered future, where all sources of useful information are guarded by castle walls.

> Kills API

> Third party integrations continue to play an important role in the way users can experience the Spotify experience through third party apps. We evaluate the set up of our platform on an ongoing basis and remain committed to ensuring it provides the best possible opportunities for developers, artists, creators and listeners.

Read that as: Hell yeah, we're gonna enshittify.

Has the same ring as "we value your privacy. That’s why we and our 739 partners want to track everything you do, link it to your real ID and sell it off to anyone willing to buy."

The New Jersey Transit app really wants me to enable location tracking for the app. It really opens up the settings app every time I buy or activate a ticket. I'm sure location tracking would really help me buy tickets and have the QR code scanned by a conductor.

Spotify announced they have shut down several API endpoints, effective immediately. They have grandfathered in existing apps that have extended mode Web API access.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com