Spotify trying to lock-in users just after IPO (2018)

Spotify was salty after Apple was mean to them; this is a good example of the fact that they aren't concerned about "fairness" as much about their own business. Users that have poured time into Spotify playlists aren't going to transfer if they can't move them. Spotify didn't even have to develop something here, they blocked the work of someone who did it for them. This isn't fair. Which is fine, but it is then okay for Apple to be "unfair" about their business too.

I can&#x27;t even recall the number of &quot;music curation&quot; and &quot;share your playlist&quot; type services I used in the &#x27;00s, and how they all folded.<p>For that reason, I&#x27;ve never bothered to make Spotify playlists, because I realized I might be locking myself in to begin with. The current generation of streaming users are now discovering something similar to what I did back then.<p>I do have some playlists on Youtube (whose selection is far bigger when you consider bootlegs, B-sides, unreleased tracks, demos etc), but I take a screenshot of it every now and then so I&#x27;ll have a copy.<p>I nearly always own a digital copy of what I listen to, so there&#x27;s really no reason to store your playlists on Spotify at all.

Should be marked (2018)<p>It would be awesome if music licenses were portable. Holding collections hostage reminds me of how carriers made it difficult or impossible to keep your phone number when moving between them.

I built a tool for exporting your Spotify playlists and library to CSV spreadsheets: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.streamexport.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.streamexport.com&#x2F;</a><p>It doesn&#x27;t &#x27;move&#x27; your playlists to other services but it gives you a record of all of your playlists that you can control and store locally.

Now you just need a tool that OCR’s screenshotted playlists and imports them... at which point Spotify will start using a less legible font... the end State will be that Spotify’s main font will be “Captcha”

&gt; Stamp is in violation of Spotify’s Developer Terms, which prohibit developers from integrating Spotify Content (including metadata) with third-party services<p>So ... It&#x27;s forbidden to use Spotify&#x27;s API?<p>I currently stay with Spotify because of its decently good UX (despite constant, nonsensical A&#x2F;B testing) and because I had the impression they were behaving well. This perception is fragile.<p>I&#x27;m not sure making your service less attractive to users will increase your stock price either.

Amazing! If you want others to play fair, you should too

The worst aspect of this post that it lacks a call-to-action. Without that, it didn&#x27;t have a chance to make an impact.<p>The second-worst aspect of this post is that it proves Spotify&#x27;s point. Not only does the author attack and threaten Spotify from start to finish, but they reinforce that the primary use case is to leave Spotify for competitive services.

Google Play Music and Apple Music also do this. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m able to move any of my playlists off their services.

Well, you can always issue a GDPR request for all your data. They&#x27;re obliged to comply, aren&#x27;t they?

&gt; Select all songs in the playlist<p>&gt; drag into textedit or equivalent<p>Tada

Who cares if you can&#x27;t export your playlists. You probably used their proprietary recommendation systems to generate them anyways. And its not like I can&#x27;t write down all of my playlists and recreate them elsewhere. Why should Spotify go out of their way to make it easier for me to switch off of their platform. I refused to get fired up over this non-issue.