A Note about Spotify Transfers • Hacker News Board

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#91

Post by ViViDboarder » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

draaglom wrote: post #67

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They say it can take up to 30 days to process. What the heck... My current day-job is a multi-tenant SaaS system - every single entity in any of our heterogenous databases is tagged with a tenant identifier (it's also used in composite PKs/FKs in RDBMS databases to prevent incorrect inter-tenant references). Every database system we use (MSSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, etc) has some way to query itself (INFORMATION_SCHEMA…

The 30 day figure is likely derived from the legal limit under GDPR for a Subject Access Request (one calendar month). Why commit to a tighter SLA than you legally have to?

Exactly. I’d be surprised if it actually takes 30 days, but there’s no point to them quoting something faster.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#92

Post by jon-wood » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

jnurmine wrote: post #29

I'm happy with Spotify and tried to figure out what this story was about. I saw "SongShift Pro starting at 4.99 USD/month". Do people go for a monthly pricing for this kind of service? I mean transferring playlists from an old service to a new service sounds like a one-off thing. Does someone really need it continuously?

I’m not sure what the reasons for continuous sync would be, but SongShift will do a manual sync between services for free, and it sounds like I did so to move from Spotify to Apple Music just in time.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#93

Post by fuzxi » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #82

yoavm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even just European lives that got better because of GDPR, we're all benefiting from having big companies forced to comply with it. I have used the "Right to erasure" multiple times with American companies just by saying I'm from Europe.

Awesome hack :) How are they going to begin to validate the you're a EU citizen?

It's probably easier for most companies to just comply with all requests than to bother with verifying the citizenship of each requester.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#94

Post by ofisboy » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

spotify early this year pulled out of all dj apps. as a user, i hate spotify for this. why wouldn't you let me dj with the music? it's not like i'm david gueatta, playing to 5000 people.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#95

Post by ghego1 » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

I use Tidal and I'm very satisfied, the catalog is huge, and the playlist are really well curated, plus their music suggestions are always spot on.

I would suggest anyone using Spotify to switch. On the plus side, Tidal also pays musicians a four times what Spotify does (last time I checked, I can't find the link), which I think is in itself a good reason to prefer it.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#96

Post by LockAndLol » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #30

I think this will push me to finally just jump to Apple Music (even though it’s worse and will now be harder to do, plus I’ll miss discover weekly). Spotify’s attack on podcasts with exclusivity and trying to destroy the open standard really bothers me: https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ Now with this I just don’t have much respect for them. When paired with their complaining about Apple’s polic…

Apple is known for making similar moves to keep people locked into their services. You won't be any safer there. Might as well use Soundcloud, Jamendo or Bandcamp. They are much more open than those 2 services.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#97

Post by londons_explore » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

trisiak wrote: post #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…

In general, GDPR data dumps are provided in "as hard to parse as possible" file formats to discourage exactly that...

Imagine things like Facebook messenger chats being indexed by a person name rather than an account ID or phone number so there is a high chance "Chat with Dave" is ambiguous... Not the kind of thing you could start a lawsuit over, but it is enough of a barrier that re-importing exported data is near impossible.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#98

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #87

actuator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which ones? GDPR guarantees "right to data portability", not "right to an open API". I'm sure they could give you a CSV if you personally write to them and still be compliant.

[deleted]

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#99

Post by miki123211 » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

Songshift should get around this restriction by providing users a nice tutorial on how to become a Spotify developer and request an API key and secret themselves. This would be pretty much impossible to ban and detect.

Even better, make a tool that accepts your login and password and does that for you.

It's quite funny that tools like Deemix[1] let you download songs from Spotify[2], but there's no way to actually export them.

[1] I won't provide a link because of piracy.

[2] Deemix internally converts to Deezer, and then downloads from that.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#100

Post by kingosticks » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

ghego1 wrote: post #95

I use Tidal and I'm very satisfied, the catalog is huge, and the playlist are really well curated, plus their music suggestions are always spot on. I would suggest anyone using Spotify to switch. On the plus side, Tidal also pays musicians a four times what Spotify does (last time I checked, I can't find the link), which I think is in itself a good reason to prefer it.

Last time I checked, Tidal had absolutely no public API. In this regard they are way behind Spotify so keep that in mind if thinking of switching.