Previous discussion(1 day old) on the same news: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001</a>
Spotify is also the company leading the charge against the openness of podcasts. That entire industry has traditionally run on open standards which prevents gatekeepers from interfering with podcast creators, podcast app creators, or end users. Spotify is trying to end that by buying up the exclusive rights to numerous podcasts, killing the open feeds for those podcasts, and forcing all listeners into the Spotify app.
I fucking hate the modern Internet. Everybody takes and nobody gives. We've regressed from the 90's/00's.<p>These platforms only care about lock-in. Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.<p>All of the platforms are catered to mass audiences anyway and suck for power users. They only want to extract money and are doing it the easiest way possible. Customers that don't complain about lack of features.<p>I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.
This is clearly a pretty lame thing for Spotify to do. The context of this particular article, however, is that John Gruber is obliquely attempting to use Spotify’s bad behavior to excuse Apple doing the same or worse on a much larger, much more significant scale.<p>This is one in a long series of recent posts dedicated to pointing out the hypocrisy of companies (Epic, Spotify, Microsoft, etc) that have been agitating for Apple to loosen its stranglehold on the iOS ecosystem.<p>The gist seems to be: “See? Everyone else is doing the same thing with their own platforms, too!” As if the self-interested actions of a bunch of huge companies is what sets the moral baseline we expect them all to adhere to.<p>I wish Gruber would spend a little more time thinking and writing about how these companies _should_ manage their platforms and a little less time trying to undercut the entirely legitimate criticisms that developers large and small have with how Apple, the world’s most valuable company, deals with them.
There is no way to spin Spotify as a customer first company with shenanigans like this. It’s my data and I should be able to do anything I want with it. I’m happy to pay for superior product experience but not for them to hold my playlist data hostage.<p>I use songshift so I can copy my Spotify playlist to Apple Music...just so I can listen to music offline on my Apple Watch. How is it reasonable to have to pay for 2 music services just because interoperability sucks. Spotify and Apple are in this tug of war and it makes them both worse companies for their users.
Is anyone reading of this surprised? It's simply "well I guess we need to increase/maintain our market share, time to lock it down!"<p>Zooming out here, I think there's an interesting pattern/trend that needs to be solved for (with old or new solutions): if you can make a superior UX and/or get a strong network effect of users, then you can make these moves and "boil the frog" so to speak. Some companies know when to stop before their users get too mad while others boil it quite quickly. I don't see any end to this problem, in music or elsewhere, unless something fundamental changes.<p>I'd be preaching to the choir here to bring up open standards, but I wonder if it is time to bring in mandated (by law) regulation for some industries. Let the current big players in a few markets design something super abstract, and then let reps from many (+ some significant representation from users / small players) maintain and slowly shape it. I'd wonder if that could even commoditize some of these to even make entry by smaller players easier.<p>Potential markets to approach with this regulation:<p>- Music<p>- App Stores<p>- Social Media Posting (I know Mastadon exists, but not going to open that can of worms in this post for now)<p>- Maps (OSM already is kind of here)<p>- Ride Sharing<p>- Food Delivery<p>- Streaming Services<p>- Health Data Apps<p>- Dating Apps<p>I think OSM is a great example of how this can bootstrap smaller players and ideas into quick effectiveness. I can't imagine what it could do for these other areas. If you remove the friction of user switching, you make it that much harder to "boil the frog".<p>Yes, regulation will inherently slow down these areas in terms of "innovation", but we as users need to ask if that speed is worth the power and control most users end up giving these companies in regards to data/privacy/long term UX and user friendliness.
Spotify should definitely allow users to shift self created playlists. That is user data and very important to some as it takes years to build.<p>Though 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.
FWIW you can download all your playlists in JSON format with the GDPR export tool in the privacy settings of your account [1]. It take "up to 30 days" for them to email you the ZIP-file. In the cased of the linked blog post, it took them 3 days, which is probably only some arbitrary amount of time to discourage you from using it effectively. The GDPR only states "without undue delay".<p>Under article 20 of the GDPR ("Right to data portability"), subsection 2 states that "[i]n exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible" [2].<p>Seeing how this has been previously been done, Spotify has already shown it to be technically possible. Enough users should be able to pressure Spotify to re-enable the API.<p>I just sent a mail to privacy@spotify.com:<p><pre><code> L.S.
I'm a paying user of the Spotify music service. I want to exercise my rights under the GDPR article 20 subsection 2 to data portability to transmit my data, namely playlist information, directly to another controller, namely SongShift.
It is clear that this is technically possible, as it has been possible in the past. However, Spotify has chosen to force SongShift to disable its API. This is in violation of my rights under the GDPR. I demand that you re-enable this API to allow me to exercise my rights under the GDPR.
I expect a notification of receipt within 5 days. I expect a full answer within 14 days. In case of no reply, or no satisfactory reply, I will enter a complaint (verzoekschriftprocedure) at the Dutch civil court (Rechtbank Midden-Nederland).
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://observablehq.com/@a-lexwein/what-i-got-when-i-requested-data-from-spotify" rel="nofollow">https://observablehq.com/@a-lexwein/what-i-got-when-i-reques...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/" rel="nofollow">https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/</a>
Even the fact that all these music services center around playlists is part of the problem. I don't want to spend my life making music playlists - I just want to play music. I don't always want to play an entire album either. What I'm saying is - if I've "added to my library" or I've "loved" a bunch of stuff, it would be so great if there were a <i>convenient</i> way for these services to auto-build playlists or just let me shuffle my whole library.
That reminds me, I had a Spotify subscription because I needed to tune out coworkers at work. Now that Im working at home I don’t need it...but first I have to save my playlists.
Does anyone know if I can (or how I can) install SongShift v 5.1.1? Seems like that's the last version that'll allow moving playlists out of Spotify
What would it cost to build an alternate streaming music service with a reasonable catalog? Is there anyway to get a reasonably priced streaming license for a decent collection of music?
The value proposition of Spotify doesn't seem all that enticing any more:<p>- Does not have many famous artists, due to licensing, and the catalog is continually decreasing.<p>- Actively anti-competitor behaviour.<p>- For a little more than a monthly subscription, you can purchase a full DRM-free album, which you can play for the rest of time.<p>I cancelled my subscription months ago.
The Spotify desktop app used to have an amazing, incredibly powerful extension/plugin system built in. I personally had many dozens of neat "Apps" installed, giving me all kinds of weird & interesting music experiences via the Spotify app.<p>That all of course got axed[1].<p>More product-oriented decisions like removal of messages & inbox[2] I am more sympathetic to, as this is more them picking & choosing? Re-work is hard[3].<p>But cutting off remaining support for DJ apps &c, as has recently happened: that's un-good[4]. Spotify withdrawing the remote-control capabilities that standard Freedesktop users have enjoyed for a decade, that's sad as heck[5] & just petty (ed: this might be more "whoops" than sinister intent).<p>In sympathy with the GDPR spirit of being-able-to-get-your-data-out, it feels there's actually a decent phase happening now, where sizable parts of the tech world are waking up to the realization that it needs to act less crummy, not box people in, not leave users feeling so trapped. Efforts like Data Transfer Project[6] have a long way to go, are frankly not yet very practical for much, but feel like one of the few places tech can redeem it's name, long term, where dignity might be restored to both parties. A starting place for not needing to be regulated into the sun as mal-competitive & toxic. This kind of re-opening from the locked-off closed inaccessible cloud tech is also, likely, necessary for innovation & competition to emerge, which is a thread Cory Doctorow discusses in his excellent & on-point discussions on Adversarial Interoperability[7]. Alas, as this Spotify story & their history indicates, not everyone is willing to help turn around our bad practices & treat other humans with technical respects & deserving of technical rights or capabilities.<p>[1] <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20160310102643/https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/apps/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20160310102643/https://developer....</a><p>[2] <a href="https://musically.com/2017/02/28/spotify-is-removing-its-inbox-and-messaging-feature/" rel="nofollow">https://musically.com/2017/02/28/spotify-is-removing-its-inb...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/56923-spotify-update-backlash-recently-played-alphabetical-scrolling" rel="nofollow">https://www.inverse.com/article/56923-spotify-update-backlas...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192473/spotify-revoking-support-developer-api-third-party-dj-apps-algoriddim-djay" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192473/spotify-revoking...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/Spotify-stops-publishing-artists-and-song-titles-to-Dbus/td-p/4824544" rel="nofollow">https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/Spotify-stops...</a><p>[6] <a href="https://datatransferproject.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://datatransferproject.dev/</a>