Tech Desk 
Nov 28, 2024
Spotify is set to no longer let developers create third-party apps with its Web Application Programming Interface (API) to access different features within the music streaming platform, like song and artist recommendations.
The company seems to be limiting third-party developers from building artificial intelligence (AI) apps using data from Spotify listeners.
The changes are set to restrict certain developers, who are 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.
Developers are losing access to Spotify’s Audio Analysis, which describes a track’s structure and rhythm. Moreover, developers lost access to Audio features, which reference the different characteristics of a song.
“With the advent of transformer models there’s probably a risk of people training new models to emulate Spotify’s model(s),” stated one developer in the forum. “I hope that’s not the reason they’re taking it down but if it is I’m just disappointed.”
Meanwhile, another developer said: “Let’s be real here, this isn’t about security or user privacy, this is about data being used for training AI models.”
These changes are said to impact developers who have more limited API access than official Spotify partners.
