This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Any FOSS / third party Spotify client I used already requires a premium account (I am fairly certain it's about playing ads), so I was under assumption developer API was the same.
Anyway, I just stopped using Spotify altogether. I'll support my local indie radio station instead.
This is going to become more of a standard due to people vibecoding their own clients for every dumb thing.
It's all about profits and psying major labels even.more
Even the Spotify shuffle feature is built to maximize profits and to hell with the user experience.
I have almost 2 thousand songs on one playlist and Spotify plays the songs from minor artists (who don't get paid much) constantly, while songs from major artists (who get paid a lot more) are never played. I'm actually surprised to hear those songs when shuffle is turned off.
They've also recently added "Video Episodes for You" to my home screen with no way to turn it off. It takes up 1/3 of the screen with helpful titles like "Session 105, Hillory Duff", and "Reinvent Life from Rock Bottom and Become Unrecognizable." I have never watched a video or listened to a podcast on Spotify.
When it comes to enshittification Spotify's got it down.
Maybe someday one of the other music services will create something like Spotify Connect.
tidal.com
Lacks a few of Spotify's features, but the audio quality is great, and it's cheaper. Plus, fuck Spotify.
Qobuz is also good, apparently.
I looked at a tital a year or so ago and it wouldn't work for me. Will look again, maybe they've improved it.
seconding Tidal.
but also feeling like buying more physical media going forward.
For me it was the opposite: Every "made for you" mix and playlist is fairly popular songs from artists that I like... But they are always the same few dozen songs, just shuffled in different order.
Video suggestions seem to appear if/after you listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I had them, my partner did not.
My "Made for You" has occasional popular artists but most of the songs are from people who are relatively unknown. The only way I listened to a podcast is if I clicked on one by accident.
I think it's more about closing a backdoor to free product that was generally out of reach for most people a few years. Free API access for devs has been a thing forever for the most part, but the barriers are now lower for people to abuse it.
Yes about profits in the sense they don't want people getting free access to content, but I don't think this is designed to net them a bunch of money or anything.
Agreed. To me, this sounds like a continuation of the abolition of Web 2.0, the era where APIs were open and nobody was talking about how they'd pay for it.
I think this will be a problem for Spotiflac
The 350GB I already downloaded should last me a while. Doesn't it already get the metadata from Deezer, and flacs from Tidal/Qobuz/Amazon, anyway? Not sure why Spotify needs to be involved.
