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.

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.

I just want my old last.fm era back.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

> 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?

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?"

> 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.

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...

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

So it seems old times weren’t that douchey.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Are LLMs actually good at music recommendation?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

UI quality is a subjective thing.

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

> out of principle

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

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.

Which is much less than Apple and Tidal.

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)

And classical music gets proper special treatment!

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

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.

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.

> De-enshittify by any means necessary!

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

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.

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.

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.

What if I told you, FLAC supports metadata?

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

> 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.

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?

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?

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%.

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

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

It's the new acquihire: acquiAPIentitlementmire.

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.