n a blog post, the Spotify streaming service announced Wednesday that it plans to cut the access for developers soon to build third-party apps with the Spotify
Web API in order to use several features such as song or artist recommendations. It seems that the streaming platform no longer wants to allow third-party developers to build apps powered by artificial intelligence based on data from Spotify's active users and 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,”, the Spotify spokesperson stated for TechCrunch.
These new Spotify changes are focused on limiting access for some developers who are presumed to use the streaming platform API incorrectly. The features that Spotify is restricting access to, are considered to disclose insights about the listening habits of the users, like artists and songs that are popular among listener groups. This valuable information could potentially be used in order to develop a rival AI-powered music recommendation model, similar to the one provided by Spotify.
It’s important to mention that besides the artists and song recommendations feature, the developers will also lose access to the Audio analysis from the Spotify Music app, which has the capability to describe the track structure or rhythm. Even more so, the music app will stop the availability of Audio Features that are focused on providing various characteristics from a song such as energy and its acoustic, along with the developer's access to use the created playlists based on algorithms.
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In response, the users have not been so pleased about these changes, in the Spotify Community forum, many people expressed their anger about the recent Spotify plans.
“With the advent of transformer models, there’s probably a risk of people training new models to emulate Spotify’s model(s). I really hope that’s not the reason they’re taking it down but if it is I’m just disappointed.”, as a developer from the Spotify forum stated.
“Let’s be real here, this isn’t about security or user privacy, this is about data being used for training AI models,”, stated another developer of the forum.
However, these changes will have an impact only on developers with more restricted Spotify API access compared to the official Spotify partners. Those developers who initially requested an extension will still have access to all the Spotify API parameters.
By
Raluca Matei
•
November 28, 2024 8:15 PM
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