Spotify has limited third-party developers’ access to its internal data, sparking speculation that the move is meant to prevent user and music data from being used to train AI models.
In a Spotify for Developers blog post on Wednesday (November 27), the streaming service announced that third-party developers will no longer be able to access certain kinds of data from Spotify.
The changes were made “with the aim of creating a more secure platform,” Spotify said.
Access has been blocked to features including recommendations, related artists, featured playlists (i.e., Spotify’s own algorithmically created playlists), category playlists, and 30-second preview URLs.
Also blocked are audio features and audio analysis. Audio features describe a track’s qualities, such as key, tempo, “acousticness” (whether or not a track is acoustic), as well as things like “danceability” and “energy.”
The audio analysis feature offers information about tracks such as beats per minute (BPM), and a song’s melodic structure.
The changes apply to new third-party apps only. Existing apps will continue to have full access to the above features, as will apps in development that have applied for an extension.
On Spotify’s community forum, third-party app developers speculated the changes were meant to frustrate the efforts of AI developers who were scraping music data from Spotify’s platform.
“I think this is not a security issue but rather a way to limit competition,” one community user wrote.
“They have been planning on releasing AI playlist creation features, and if I am not mistaken more track data within their native app and this is a way to curb any applications that are utilizing these endpoints that could compete with those features.”
“Let’s be real here, this isn’t about security or user privacy, this is about data being used for training AI models,” another user wrote.
Spotify has been rolling out AI-powered features over the past few years, including an “AI DJ,” now available in some 50 markets worldwide, including the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
The platform’s AI playlist feature, launched earlier this year, has expanded from the UK and Australia to the US, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Some music companies have previously expressed concerns that AI developers are using streaming services to scrape data for their models.
In 2023, per a Financial Times report, Universal Music Group sent a letter to Spotify and Apple Music asking the streaming services to prevent AI services from scraping melodies and lyrics from UMG’s copyrighted songs.
“We’re committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all Spotify stakeholders.”
Spotify community manager
Spotify’s recent move has proven controversial among third-party developers who use the platform’s API to create apps for Spotify users. (An API is a kind of software that allows two different software apps to talk to each other. It’s the common way by which third-party developers can build apps that integrate with services such as Google, Fortnite, or Spotify.)
Some third-party developers expressed anger over the sudden announcement, which came without advance notice.
“I was trying to make an app that helped users build playlists by finding great candidate tracks, building queues, and pushing them to Spotify as playlists (for DJ-like super-users),” a community user wrote.
“Some notice would have been nice at the very least. I was literally mid-coding when my whole app basically went dead… There is nowhere else to get data like this out there, so you’ve effectively just destroyed the last few months of work for me.”
“We’re committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all Spotify stakeholders,” a Spotify community manager wrote.Music Business Worldwide
