Spotify says it’s making the changes to improve security.
  • BougieBirdie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    49·
    18 days ago

    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.”

    This is fairly disingenuous. The affected endpoints are all GET requests, which are read-only requests that provide some data about the track/artist/playlist/etc. There isn’t really very much potential to do anything insecure here.

    The only thing they’re securing is their hegemony.

      • Lime Buzz@beehaw.orgEnglish
        10·
        17 days ago

        I mean, we could all move to Funk Whale, however, finding/sharing music on that would be if not illegal then highly contencious.

        • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
          5·
          17 days ago

          For recommendations and discovery (which was a large part of what kept me with Spotify), I’m a big fan of https://listenbrainz.org/ In the time I’ve been using it, the recommendations have gotten way better, and I appreciate their efforts towards transparency. (Yay for open source)

          You can import listen data from music streaming services, so if anyone is curious, I’d recommend setting it up and seeing how it goes; I only recently got round to cancelling my Spotify, but before then, I had it set up so my Spotify listens would show up on my listenbrainz.

          You’re quite right though that there aren’t any straightforward replacements for Spotify. Personally, I’m returning to the seven seas, which is why I’m so appreciative of listenbrainz — that discovery stuff really was the last big thing chaining me to Spotify

          • flora_explora@beehaw.org
            1·
            17 days ago

            Hm, maybe I should give listenbrainz another go then. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve used it for some time now to scrobble music so it should know what I’m listening to. Unfortunately my taste in music doesn’t seem to be that predictable because all services I’ve tried out have been quite bad at it. I tend to go on manual deep dives into obscure music on bandcamp hopping from one artist to another. Most recommendations I get from algorithms like Spotify tend to be rather popular-focused music which I often don’t really enjoy. (Not trying to be edgy here, don’t think it is inherently better or worse to like mainstream stuff, this is just a genuine problem I frequently face).