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Spotify announced in a statement that it will no longer allow developers to create third-party apps using its Web API to access many features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations. Developer blog post Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting the ability of third-party developers to create AI apps using data from Spotify listeners.
“As part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges many companies face today, we are making changes to our public APIs,” a Spotify spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch.
The changes are designed to limit some developers who are believed to be abusing its API, including by scraping data from its platform. Features that Spotify revokes access to could reveal information about the listening habits of Spotify’s user base, including which artists and songs different listener groups listen to most often. These could be used to create competitive AI-powered music recommendation models, which Spotify itself has been developing in recent years.
In addition to song and artist recommendations on Spotify, developers are losing access to Spotify recommendations Acoustic analysiswhich describes the structure and rhythm of the track. Developers also lost access to Audio featureswhich refers to various characteristics of a song, including its “danceability”, energy, and whether it is acoustic. Spotify has cut off access for developers to use algorithmically generated playlists as well.
On Spotify Community forummany people expressed their anger about the music platform removing access to these features. While some developers were using these features to create AI-powered music recommendation services, others were creating apps that had nothing to do with AI recommendations, but would now lose access anyway.
“With the advent of adapter models, there is potentially a risk that people will train new models to emulate Spotify’s model(s),” he said. One developer on the forum. “I really hope that’s not why they removed it, but if that’s the case then I’m disappointed.”
“Let’s be real here, it’s not about security or user privacy, it’s about the data used to train AI models,” he said. Another developer.
Spotify has been building AI-powered music models in recent years, and its CEO, Daniel Ek, has previously said he believes AI will “Huge creativity” in music. Spotify has released a few AI products based on these models in recent years, including an AI DJ last year. The company has also rolled out its AI playlists to more users in the US, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand in recent months.
These changes will only affect developers who have more limited access to the API than official Spotify partners. Developers who previously applied for an extension will still be able to use these API endpoints, however, it doesn’t appear that Spotify has warned developers that these changes are coming.
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