Spotify suddenly cut off app developers from a bunch of its data

Spotify pulled the rug out from developers last week, announcing sudden changes to its API policies just before Thanksgiving that cut new apps and apps in development off from access to the platform’s data.

As of November 27th, the day Spotify revealed the changes, new “Web API use cases” will lose access to certain kinds of music data, according to the announcement. The data includes the ability to access Spotify’s catalog information about related artists and Spotify’s algorithmic and editorially-curated playlists. This change affects apps that are in development mode, meaning they’re under construction or used by up to 25 people, and new apps registered on or after the day of the announcement.

If you already have an app that’s widely available, it appears that your app can still access the affected endpoints as it could before. But for developers who have been working on an app or building one for more limited use, this is a major and disheartening change.

“Basically, without warning and on a major holiday, Spotify cut access to a bunch of very useful API endpoints that they’d been providing for years,” Faisal Alquaddoomi, who had been working on an app to visualize music on a DIY LED display, tells The Verge. Alquaddoomi wasn’t aware of the changes until seeing the blog post and says that Spotify didn’t send a proactive notification.

Douglas Adams, a software engineer (who is not the famous author), uses Spotify’s APIs to “measure the therapeutic impact of music on patients undergoing life saving treatments” as part of a project he’s working on with UCLA. He says the APIs are “critical” to the study and that he had to work through the holiday weekend to mitigate the impact of the changes on the project. “The alternative is not a straight-forward replacement and will take weeks of work to approach the capability I had before Spotify’s change,” Adams says.

Broken Holiday, a lo-fi producer, has been working on an app for artists to manage multiple playlists using automation. But with the API changes, the app can’t see what’s on a given playlist, Broken Holiday says.

Spotify has vaguely attributed the need for the API changes to improving security:

• In its blog post, Spotify says that it rolled out the changes with “the aim of creating a more secure platform.”
• In a community forum post, a Spotify employee says that “we want to reiterate the main message from the blog that we’re committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all Spotify stakeholders.” The post has many pages of replies from frustrated developers.
• In a statement to The Verge, Spotify spokesperson Brittney Le Roy says that “as part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs.”

The company hasn’t explained why it changed its policies so suddenly and with no warning. But like with Strava’s recently-announced API changes that restrict data sharing to other apps and Reddit’s API pricing changes that sparked protests last year, Spotify’s API changes are yet another reminder of the tenuousness of building apps for other platforms.