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A Note about Spotify Transfers

songshift.com

1–10 of 180 posts

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#2
Unsurprising, for core business reasons, for sure. But, it is still customer-unfriendly behavior from Spotify. And probably anti-competitive too.

Boy, as one of the very few people who switched over from Spotify to Apple Music, I’m hoping that the Spotify vs. Apple lawsuit turns on Spotify’s head over this

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#3
Keep in mind this doesn't actually "copy the files" but creates songs and playlist entries in another service, so nothing nefarious is happening. Spotify is just salty there's a service that allows to quickly find the same songs elsewhere.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#4
Seems like an obvious and sane target for antitrust legislation - compare with e.g. the mobile number portability directive in the EU way back in 2002.

Related opinion piece:

> Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018)

http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-...

> In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we could easily transfer our playlists between online music platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), our files between cloud service providers (Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.), our purchase records between online retailers (Amazon, CDiscount, Zalando, etc.) or our social graph between social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc). By limiting platform lock-in, such measures would significantly intensify competition within these market segments.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#6
Practices like that are directly against the spirit of data portability under GDPR and CCPA. What's protecting Spotify here is that the user's data is accessed through an API not considered for that privacy control use case.

In principle, a tool for transferring of user's data could be operating on a GDPR/CCPA data export that has to be available for all Spotify users in California and EU. Those are just not exposes as easy-to-use APIs (yet).

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#8
post #2

Unsurprising, for core business reasons, for sure. But, it is still customer-unfriendly behavior from Spotify. And probably anti-competitive too. Boy, as one of the very few people who switched over from Spotify to Apple Music, I’m hoping that the Spotify vs. Apple lawsuit turns on Spotify’s head over this

I still wish Spotify wins the Apple lawsuit but Spotify needs to change their stance here.

They curate some really good playlists, so they can restrict them but they should allow user created playlists to be exported.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#9
I just used a similar service to move from Apple Music to Spotify. Now I'm thinking I should move back before Spotify tries to hold my playlists hostage.

Spotify Developer Platform Team, if you're listening: you're imbeciles for doing this and you're putting customers back in a buying position when they were happy to keep giving you money forever.

starts looking at alternatives

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#10
post #4

Seems like an obvious and sane target for antitrust legislation - compare with e.g. the mobile number portability directive in the EU way back in 2002. Related opinion piece: > Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018) http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-... > In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we cou…

Also, it runs afoul of sections of GDPR.

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.

But if my understanding of GDPR is right they have to allow users to transfer playlists created by themselves.

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