Spotify cuts developer access to several of its recommendation features

Spotify will no longer allow developers building third-party apps with its Web API to access several features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company announced in a developer blog post on Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting third-party developers from building AI apps using data from Spotify listeners.

“As part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs,” said a Spotify spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.

The changes are designed to limit certain developers who it believes have been misusing its API, including by scraping data from its platform. The features Spotify is revoking access to could reveal information about the Spotify userbase’s listening habits, including the artists and songs that are often listened to by different listener groups. These could be used to create competitive AI music recommendation models, which Spotify itself has been developing in recent years.

Beyond Spotify’s song and artist recommendations, developers are losing access to Spotify’s Audio Analysis, which describes a track’s structure and rhythm. Developers also lost access to Audio Features, which reference the different characteristics of a song, including its “danceability,” energy, and whether it’s acoustic. Spotify cut access for developers to use its algorithmically-created playlists, as well.

In Spotify’s community forum, several people expressed outrage about the music platform revoking access to these features. While some developers were using these features to create AI music recommendation services, others were building apps that have nothing to do with AI recommendations, but will now be losing access all the same.

“With the advent of transformer models there’s probably a risk of people training new models to emulate Spotify’s model(s),” said one developer in the forum. “I really hope that’s not the reason they’re taking it down but if it is I’m just disappointed.”

“Let’s be real here, this isn’t about security or user privacy, this is about data being used for training AI models,” said another developer.

Spotify has been building AI music models in recent years, and its CEO, Daniel Ek, has previously said he thinks AI will be “huge for 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 also rolled out its AI playlists to more users in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand in recent months.

These changes will only affect developers who have more limited API access than official Spotify partners. Developers who have previously applied for an extension will still be able to use these API endpoints, however, it does not appear that Spotify warned developers these changes were coming.

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