Developers Lose Access to Some of Spotify’s Recommendation APIs

According to a developer blog post published by Spotify on Wednesday, the music streaming network will soon cut off access to some features, such as artist and song suggestions, for developers using its Web API to create third-party apps. The business seems to be imposing restrictions on third-party developers who want to create artificial intelligence applications using Spotify users’ data.

Additionally, a representative from Spotify said that the company is “making changes to our public APIs” as part of its continuous effort to tackle the security issues that many firms face today.

Spotify Cuts API Access Over Data Misuse Concerns

The changes are meant to stop some developers from abusing their API unlawfully, like by scraping data from their platforms. The features that Spotify removes may expose data on the Spotify user base’s listening habits, such as the most popular artists and songs among different demographics. Spotify has been working on its own artificial intelligence music recommendation models for a while now, and these might be utilized to generate rival models.

In addition to artist and song recommendations, developers will no longer have access to Spotify’s Audio Analysis, which breaks down a song’s rhythm and structure. Developers were also unable to access Audio Features, which provide information about a song’s intensity level, “danceability,” and acoustic status. Even Spotify’s algorithmically generated playlists are no longer accessible to developers.

Some Spotify users took to the platform’s community forum to express their frustration at the music streaming service for removing the functionality. Others have built apps that are completely unrelated to AI recommendations but will still lose access even though they were leveraging these technologies to build AI music recommendation services.

One developer on the forum expressed concern that “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.”

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