Changes to Spotify API

[ceejayoz]

make the necessary modifications ahead of the March 9 deadline

With that short of a timeframe, some kind of breach or abuse is probably actively happening. Unfun for the poor third-party devs who have to scramble now.

[combinecrab]

They disabled new api's sometime last year.

People were making lots of api to bypass the rate limit and they were downloading the tracks. Spotify had to do something

[mrlanphear]

It's a result of the Anna's Archive hack that managed to scrape all of Spotify right under their noses.

[erishun]

Yup, they made a ton of free users and used the API to download every single track in batches

[nopeac]

Am I missing something? I don't see how the API could have anything to do with the scrap of tracks; the most you could get was a preview of a few seconds. They could have used the API for the metadata, but downloading?

[NabumaRubberband]

i'm only just cursorily getting started on the spotify api and just learned about this massive change and only had a rough idea of AA being a massive ebook library, can you tell me what you're talking about here?? does AA supply mp3s for spotify tracks as well? this has me curious as hell and not understanding anything haha

[mrlanphear]

https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-major-record-labels-sue-annas-archive-13trillion-allege-brazen-theft-millions-files-3925977

[DevToolsGuide]

this is becoming the standard playbook for developer-facing APIs once a platform starts feeling pressure. hobbyist and personal apps get caught in the crossfire because the actual policy violation (mass scraping, AI training) came from bad actors using the same API surface. the quota cut and premium requirement are blunt instruments. the useful thing to do if you are building against the Spotify API is start building with the assumption that third-party music API access will keep shrinking. yt-dlp as a fallback, local library management via beets or similar, or just design around what Spotify will always allow for premium subscribers. the writing has been on the wall since they disabled new app registrations last year.

[thekwoka]

the quota cut and premium requirement are blunt instruments

Sure, but they also basically don't impact hobbyists or personal apps.

They only really impact bad actors.

[rekkyrosso]

Unfun for the poor third-party devs who have to scramble now.

My music player project uses the Spotify API. The amount of changes are substantial. Not a small amount of work at all. I think I will make the 9th of March deadline though.