Spotify say bye-bye-bye to its third-party API users

Well, not quite. But close.

Spotify have shut down access to eight web APIs to new users, including:

• Related Artists, which returns a list of artists similar to a specified artist.

• Recommendations, which returns recommendations based on specified artists and tracks.

• Audio Features, which returns fun metrics like the danceability of a song, whether it's acoustic, its loudness, its energy, and more.

• Audio Analysis, which returns a track's structure, rhythm, pitch, and timbre.

What gives?

Spotify assure the reason behind this lockdown is purely safety. A spokesperson for the company said: “As part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs".

Now, you might be wondering: How could pulling the danceability of a song via API affect the company's security? Fair question, and one the community is challenging, too.

"Something tells me the timing here is not a coincidence," said someone on the Spotify Developer forum. "With the advent of transformer models there's probably a risk of people training new models to emulate Spotify's model(s)."

Could a maliciously inclined individual use Spotify's API and a slew of AI products to create a Spotify competitor? It certainly seems possible.

While most API users are not malicious, unfortunately they are shut down all the same.