Seems like an obvious and sane target for antitrust legislation - compare with e.g. the mobile number portability directive in the EU way back in 2002.
Related opinion piece:
> Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018)
> In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we could easily transfer our playlists between online music platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), our files between cloud service providers (Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.), our purchase records between online retailers (Amazon, CDiscount, Zalando, etc.) or our social graph between social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc). By limiting platform lock-in, such measures would significantly intensify competition within these market segments.
The irony is that Spotify is a partner in the app store fairness coalition (https://appfairness.org/).
I consider their developer platform[1] to be an app store of sorts, and they do not play fair when it comes to holding onto their market power in certain areas.
Anyone have a contact in the App Fairness Coalition to raise these points with?
Yeah, seriously. There isn’t some higher ideal — every company is in it for themselves and then works on justifying the policy that will further their interests through such coalitions.
No doubt that the same company that sends a cease and desist to a developer who provides an export feature would act the same way as Apple if they were in its shoes.
According to Spotify’s own site [0], their users have
> ...the right to request a copy of your personal data in electronic format and the right to transmit that personal data for use in another party’s service...
I've just requested my data. When I get it I'll take a look and see if it contains playlist information and either edit this comment or post a reply to myself if the edit window has closed with the results. They say it can take up to 30 days to process.
I've done that. Ignoring that it takes a few days to receive a dumb, what you get is just a subset of data.
I've been a Spotify user for over half a decade, but the oldest date I could find in the dump was a little over two years ago.
I then contacted their support asking for all data, but I've made a mistake of contacting them with a wrong email address (which lead to them being unable to find my account) and I haven't bothered since.
In the best case scenario, I'd say it takes a week to get the entire dump, which is not very convenient for switching to a competitor.
I haven't tried doing so with Spotify, but basically it's typically too complicated and slow (see other comments) to be practically useful for the typical consumer of today.
It doesn't include any standardized/machine-readable identifiers.
For example, the Spotify API track-level responses always contain the ISRC [1], but the JSON files contained in the GDPR request don't.
Spotify clearly does only the bare minimum required by the law and even actively frustrates GDPR requests by taking the maximum allowed time to respond to them.
I don't agree that Spotify has to let users transfer Spotify curated playlists as that is a business strength. Songshift seems to show Spotify curated playlists on their homepage like Discover Weekly so I can see why Spotify won't like this.
But if my understanding of GDPR is right they have to allow users to transfer playlists created by themselves.
In practise you can expect to receive a (link to a) zip file via email with a bunch of XML documents after going through a convoluted dance. Also, it often takes some time (days) to receive the data. Basically, nothing that can easily be automated by a third part service - you need user auth of the requesting user to access the data.)
"You must comply with a request for data portability without undue delay and at the latest within one month of receipt of the request"
I guess it's because data portability isn't trivial, and it was wasn't the key aspect of GDPR.
As a contrast: The EU mobile number portability legislation says: max 1 working day.
Which ones? GDPR guarantees "right to data portability", not "right to an open API". I'm sure they could give you a CSV if you personally write to them and still be compliant.
This one is clearly anti-competive and I hope someone will help them out and pick it up. This is the most obvious requirement for the future of preventing these monopolies. The ability to get your data out.
Keep in mind this doesn't actually "copy the files" but creates songs and playlist entries in another service, so nothing nefarious is happening. Spotify is just salty there's a service that allows to quickly find the same songs elsewhere.
Somewhat bemusingly, Spotify has an IFTTT applet that does nearly the same thing called "Automatically add your saved tracks in Spotify to a Google spreadsheet".
Playing devil’s advocate here. But, I think it can be bad for Spotify if the user copies the playlist that’s being curated by Spotify to another streaming service. It’s good for them if they could add some friction to it by, you know—manually copy it and doesn’t let it update automatically every time they make a change to the playlist—by shutting down the API for this kind of request altogether.
It’s not about “allows user to quickly find the same songs elsewhere”, because if you’re not ready for that then you shouldn’t probably be in this business in the first place.
Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst.
Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months.
BUT I do love how Apple Music integrates with my iOS devices and I think the sound quality is better. So I just use Songshift to sync the discovery playlists to AM (semi)automatically.
There’s a simple solution to this, and that is to only allow playlist-level API access where the playlist author matches the account making the request. Users can transfer out any playlists they created, while Spotify keeps Rap Caviar or whatever exclusive to the service.
Now with this I just don’t have much respect for them.
When paired with their complaining about Apple’s policies being unfair it makes me really dislike them, they don’t care about their users or what’s best for them. It wouldn’t surprise me if soon I have to call and beg them to cancel my subscription like Sirius XM.
FreeYourMusic also still works, so if you want to do this download it quickly before Spotify forces them to break the feature.
Hi, founder of FreeYourMusic here. It will still work, Spotify tried to block us just the same two years ago. We then switched to different method of integration to not be legally bound via SDK agreements.
We are still operational and have Spotify export working. If they won't let you through doors, we get in via window. ️
We do not expect any platforms to be limited on FYM.FM in near future.
I just switched to Tidal in protest of Spotify’s support of that nonsense app alliance and their constant attacks on the podcast ecosystem.
I really miss when they were laser focused on music. If they drop their bad business practices, I will switch back. For now I’m really feeling the need for competition.
Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately. Tidal is better overall in my experience and as far as I can tell they’re not being anticompetitive in any way.
I switched to Tidal about 8 months ago (from Spotify) and I have to say about the only thing it has going for it is the slightly better sound quality.
Otherwise it is completely inferior to Spotify in each and every way, starting with the core functionality that is a train wreck, at least on macOS. I regularly have issues with the scrobbler getting out of sync, recently playback stops after ~5 seconds when waking my mac from sleep and I have to restart it. The experience is just a mess.
On top of that it is 2x the price of Spotify. I am seriously thinking switching back to Spotify just because the SQ difference is not worth the disaster that comes with it.
Amusingly enough, I think the podcast move was a realisation that like Netflix they will need their own content to prosper in the long run when faced against goliaths like Apple, as big players will just throw money and platform advantages at their services.
Apple is known for making similar moves to keep people locked into their services. You won't be any safer there. Might as well use Soundcloud, Jamendo or Bandcamp. They are much more open than those 2 services.
Does Apple actually offer any of the services Spotify is banning via ToS? This feels like both companies are clearly in the wrong for engaging in the same sort of bad behavior.
I just used a similar service to move from Apple Music to Spotify. Now I'm thinking I should move back before Spotify tries to hold my playlists hostage.
Spotify Developer Platform Team, if you're listening: you're imbeciles for doing this and you're putting customers back in a buying position when they were happy to keep giving you money forever.
As far as I can tell, Spotify doesn't really have a Developer Platform team, just a legal department enforcing their ToS. All of their various SDKs are poorly maintained with zero points of contact. I think it's just a handful of engineers who care, working in their spare time at an organization that doesn't have any interest in giving them actual resources.
For example: their web playback SDK has a provision about "contact us to use for noncommercial purposes," and there's a long-standing GitHub issue specifically about how no one has ever gotten a reply back when they email about this.
Meanwhile, when I had a problem with MusicKit JS - the Apple Music equivalent - I actually got a reply back within a few weeks from an Apple engineer about it that helped me resolve it. Obviously not the shortest timescale, but at least there's clearly some effort being put into it. It helps that they actually are using MusicKit JS to power their own Apple Music web player, while Spotify's playback SDK is a separate codebase, which is why it's missing features like Safari playback that are present in the web player.
Spotify's new mobile SDKs are also unusably awful, and can't do basic functions like "playing a single song and stopping instead of autoplaying onwards." They also have deprecated and killed off several past mobile SDKs that were far more feature-filled. I saw a new Spotify-powered radio app that launched recently (Station Rotation) appears to be using the legacy undocumented SDK for playback because of this - can't imagine that app will have much of a future if Spotify ever decides to finally break that SDK.
Honestly, I expect Spotify to completely kill their public APIs and SDKs within the next two years. They clearly see no value in them, or they would have invested in maintaining them.
They also slowly, semi-silently killed off libspotify without ever providing a proper replacement (despite promising such), taking down several open source clients in the process.
It's baffling. They could've had a distinct advantage being one of the only developer-friendly (and thus highly flexible/adaptable) streaming services on the market, but they instead decided to toss that in the garbage bin and push usage of the official client, which sees constant frustrating UI changes for no good reason.
Yeah they've been on the "Twitter path" with their developer tools..
As they mature and double-down on value extraction from their existing customers, they are cutting off more and more interesting third-party services that helped them grow but are now seen as competitors or detriments to their revenue.
I really hope Spotify is listening and prepared to be responsive. I was loyal for years and convinced a few friends to sign up, but now I’m sending people to Tidal or really any other alternative. I prefer my music providers to not be actively malicious.
I'm on Google Play Music and won't move to Youtube music because it's awful, and Shopify was my preferred destination until today. But seeing how hard they make it for users to move out, I'm not interested anymore.
At least Google Takeout allows me to export my GPM data very easily.
What's wrong with YouTube Music in your opinion? I haven't tried it out much but YouTube has a really good video player and an extensive library of music videos and music in general so I'm surprised you'd say it's awful.
This is so anti-user. A similar service offered by Spotify is how I moved from Apple Music to Spotify. The playlists belong to the user - this is vendor lock in of the worst sort.
Spotify doesn't want Apple to squeeze them with App Store fees and a competing service, but when it comes to restricting the free flow of data out of their service to other services then is fine to be anti-competitive.
I'm a happy Spotify user but this is plain hypocrite. You cannot claim to be against the power of larger corps while you as a big corp are doing the same to smaller companies.
Unsurprising, for core business reasons, for sure. But, it is still customer-unfriendly behavior from Spotify. And probably anti-competitive too.
Boy, as one of the very few people who switched over from Spotify to Apple Music, I’m hoping that the Spotify vs. Apple lawsuit turns on Spotify’s head over this
Yaaaassss! Spotify has such a good recommendation system! I loved every new artist I discovered through Spotify. I only wish they’d let me port all that over to Apple Music. Oh well. Fingers crossed, I guess.
Readit News
Related opinion piece:
> Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018)
http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-...
> In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we could easily transfer our playlists between online music platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), our files between cloud service providers (Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.), our purchase records between online retailers (Amazon, CDiscount, Zalando, etc.) or our social graph between social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc). By limiting platform lock-in, such measures would significantly intensify competition within these market segments.
I consider their developer platform[1] to be an app store of sorts, and they do not play fair when it comes to holding onto their market power in certain areas.
Anyone have a contact in the App Fairness Coalition to raise these points with?
[1] https://developer.spotify.com/community/showcase/
No doubt that the same company that sends a cease and desist to a developer who provides an export feature would act the same way as Apple if they were in its shoes.
> ...the right to request a copy of your personal data in electronic format and the right to transmit that personal data for use in another party’s service...
[0] https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s3
Why can’t a transfer service just use that file?
Perhaps, it doesn’t include playlists or liked artists/albums/songs?
I've been a Spotify user for over half a decade, but the oldest date I could find in the dump was a little over two years ago.
I then contacted their support asking for all data, but I've made a mistake of contacting them with a wrong email address (which lead to them being unable to find my account) and I haven't bothered since.
In the best case scenario, I'd say it takes a week to get the entire dump, which is not very convenient for switching to a competitor.
For example, the Spotify API track-level responses always contain the ISRC [1], but the JSON files contained in the GDPR request don't.
Spotify clearly does only the bare minimum required by the law and even actively frustrates GDPR requests by taking the maximum allowed time to respond to them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...
I don't agree that Spotify has to let users transfer Spotify curated playlists as that is a business strength. Songshift seems to show Spotify curated playlists on their homepage like Discover Weekly so I can see why Spotify won't like this.
But if my understanding of GDPR is right they have to allow users to transfer playlists created by themselves.
Regarding GDPR and data portability:
In practise you can expect to receive a (link to a) zip file via email with a bunch of XML documents after going through a convoluted dance. Also, it often takes some time (days) to receive the data. Basically, nothing that can easily be automated by a third part service - you need user auth of the requesting user to access the data.)
"You must comply with a request for data portability without undue delay and at the latest within one month of receipt of the request"
I guess it's because data portability isn't trivial, and it was wasn't the key aspect of GDPR.
As a contrast: The EU mobile number portability legislation says: max 1 working day.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
https://ifttt.com/applets/n6RGLXBf
It’s not about “allows user to quickly find the same songs elsewhere”, because if you’re not ready for that then you shouldn’t probably be in this business in the first place.
Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst.
Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months.
BUT I do love how Apple Music integrates with my iOS devices and I think the sound quality is better. So I just use Songshift to sync the discovery playlists to AM (semi)automatically.
Spotify’s attack on podcasts with exclusivity and trying to destroy the open standard really bothers me: https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/
Now with this I just don’t have much respect for them.
When paired with their complaining about Apple’s policies being unfair it makes me really dislike them, they don’t care about their users or what’s best for them. It wouldn’t surprise me if soon I have to call and beg them to cancel my subscription like Sirius XM.
FreeYourMusic also still works, so if you want to do this download it quickly before Spotify forces them to break the feature.
We are still operational and have Spotify export working. If they won't let you through doors, we get in via window. ️
We do not expect any platforms to be limited on FYM.FM in near future.
I really miss when they were laser focused on music. If they drop their bad business practices, I will switch back. For now I’m really feeling the need for competition.
Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately. Tidal is better overall in my experience and as far as I can tell they’re not being anticompetitive in any way.
Otherwise it is completely inferior to Spotify in each and every way, starting with the core functionality that is a train wreck, at least on macOS. I regularly have issues with the scrobbler getting out of sync, recently playback stops after ~5 seconds when waking my mac from sleep and I have to restart it. The experience is just a mess.
On top of that it is 2x the price of Spotify. I am seriously thinking switching back to Spotify just because the SQ difference is not worth the disaster that comes with it.
That's funny, just a few comments up there's someone saying that Apple Music sounds better than Spotify
Why would that be?
It doesn't help Spotify's image though.
Apple has also been a good steward of podcasts and keeping the open standard.
Spotify Developer Platform Team, if you're listening: you're imbeciles for doing this and you're putting customers back in a buying position when they were happy to keep giving you money forever.
starts looking at alternatives
For example: their web playback SDK has a provision about "contact us to use for noncommercial purposes," and there's a long-standing GitHub issue specifically about how no one has ever gotten a reply back when they email about this.
Meanwhile, when I had a problem with MusicKit JS - the Apple Music equivalent - I actually got a reply back within a few weeks from an Apple engineer about it that helped me resolve it. Obviously not the shortest timescale, but at least there's clearly some effort being put into it. It helps that they actually are using MusicKit JS to power their own Apple Music web player, while Spotify's playback SDK is a separate codebase, which is why it's missing features like Safari playback that are present in the web player.
Spotify's new mobile SDKs are also unusably awful, and can't do basic functions like "playing a single song and stopping instead of autoplaying onwards." They also have deprecated and killed off several past mobile SDKs that were far more feature-filled. I saw a new Spotify-powered radio app that launched recently (Station Rotation) appears to be using the legacy undocumented SDK for playback because of this - can't imagine that app will have much of a future if Spotify ever decides to finally break that SDK.
Honestly, I expect Spotify to completely kill their public APIs and SDKs within the next two years. They clearly see no value in them, or they would have invested in maintaining them.
It's baffling. They could've had a distinct advantage being one of the only developer-friendly (and thus highly flexible/adaptable) streaming services on the market, but they instead decided to toss that in the garbage bin and push usage of the official client, which sees constant frustrating UI changes for no good reason.
As they mature and double-down on value extraction from their existing customers, they are cutting off more and more interesting third-party services that helped them grow but are now seen as competitors or detriments to their revenue.
Deleted Comment
We don't want the users to be able to easily shift from our platform to anyone else's, though. That's bad!
(Obviously the corporate interests only align with the consumer interest when it serves the bottom line of the corporation.)
At least Google Takeout allows me to export my GPM data very easily.
I'm a happy Spotify user but this is plain hypocrite. You cannot claim to be against the power of larger corps while you as a big corp are doing the same to smaller companies.
Boy, as one of the very few people who switched over from Spotify to Apple Music, I’m hoping that the Spotify vs. Apple lawsuit turns on Spotify’s head over this
They curate some really good playlists, so they can restrict them but they should allow user created playlists to be exported.