A Note about Spotify Transfers • Hacker News Board

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#101

Post by watermelon0 » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

actuator wrote: post #54

tpmx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel they could have included a clause that would let a designated third party access the extracted data on the requester's behalf in an automated way. I think it could have worked pretty well to keep it as vague as that. (The auth aspects would need more detail, obviously.) I don't think data format fragmentation is a big issue (just implement adapters for the top five competitors in your market...), but rather th…

> I feel they could have included a clause that would let a designated third party access the extracted data on the requester's behalf in an automated way. Yeah, this would have been nice. I am not sure if legally you could enforce that as automation itself is vague and depends on the source and target both. > I don't think data format fragmentation is a big issue (just implement adapters for the top five competitors…

This really depends on the service. In my experience, Netflix and Facebook took only a few hours to export the data.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#102

Post by kingosticks » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #90

avolcano wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, Spotify doesn't really have a Developer Platform team, just a legal department enforcing their ToS. All of their various SDKs are poorly maintained with zero points of contact. I think it's just a handful of engineers who care, working in their spare time at an organization that doesn't have any interest in giving them actual resources. For example: their web playback SDK has a provision about "…

They also slowly, semi-silently killed off libspotify without ever providing a proper replacement (despite promising such), taking down several open source clients in the process. It's baffling. They could've had a distinct advantage being one of the only developer-friendly (and thus highly flexible/adaptable) streaming services on the market, but they instead decided to toss that in the garbage bin and push usage of…

I do agree with all of this. But I would say that despite all the screw-ups, missed opportunities and general incompetence, I think Spotify still offer the best features/API for developers. Which is a sad state for us.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#103

Post by Polylactic_acid » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

bnt wrote: post #45

theshrike79 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I use SongShift for :D Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst. Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months. BUT I do love how…

Apple Music is shit. Period. I rage quit the 6 month free trial the other day after “Siri, play the US top charts” resulted in “Sure, here’s the top charts in Serbia”. I’m not in Serbia. Their discovery is crap, YouTube has better music recommendations, most EDM is missing. No value in it at all.

I quit the trial because the web app was totally broken. Not only was it super slow, it was buggy. Clicking a song would often play a different one in the list and it would regularly get stuck trying to play a song.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#104

Post by whoisjuan » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

Spotify doesn't want Apple to squeeze them with App Store fees and a competing service, but when it comes to restricting the free flow of data out of their service to other services then is fine to be anti-competitive.

I'm a happy Spotify user but this is plain hypocrite. You cannot claim to be against the power of larger corps while you as a big corp are doing the same to smaller companies.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#105

Post by Polylactic_acid » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #72

But of course it’s Apple who is evil in Spotify’s eyes...

Last time I used apple music I did not see any options for exporting playlists.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#106

Post by punnerud » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

In EU the almost only thing that stop you from building up other software is copyright. Legal restrictions (as Spotify terms) to stop you is null and void, as the Database directive states: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... Reevaluation of the directive (2018): http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8466-2018-IN...

To count as copyright there have to be a substantial manual effort into production of the data. Also byproduct of your ordinary business is not copyright (called “sui generis”).

On page 15 there is also about the “horse race” case taken to the court, that state the same.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#107

Post by jrockway » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #69

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…

It's obviously not a technical problem. The 30 days comes from the GDPR legislation. Spotify is just behaving like an obnoxious child that needs a good smackdown from the EU. Howevever the GDPR also stipulates that this needs to happen without "undue delay". I'm not a lawyer specializing in EU law, but I think this wording was put there for the precise reason of being able to punish companies that behave like that. T…

I don't think that's fair. If the law sets the limit at 30 days, there is no reason to do it sooner than 30 days. It is obviously a money-losing proposition to do it quickly, and the only reason it's an option at all is because of the law. I guess that makes it a reasonable compromise -- everyone is equally unhappy, but the world is a slightly better place.

The reality is that "30 days" translates to "someone will run a script manually once a month" whereas something like "100 milliseconds" would force you to have automation. It's a reasonable tradeoff for rare events. There is a lot less engineering effort required, and that makes it cheaper.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#108

Post by avolcano » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #99

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 ex…

Sadly, if they tried your first suggestion, Spotify would almost certainly lock down developer access like Twitter has for their new API, requiring an application and manual approval.

Login/password and scraping is a more interesting alternative, but then Spotify would presumedly block any server-side scraping. Really, best option I can come up with is browser automation that is entirely client-side (whether a browser extension or maybe wrapping Puppeteer).

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#109

Post by BlueGh0st » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

lxe wrote: post #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.

Somewhat bemusingly, Spotify has an IFTTT applet that does nearly the same thing called "Automatically add your saved tracks in Spotify to a Google spreadsheet".

https://ifttt.com/applets/n6RGLXBf

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#110

Post by rtsil » Sun, Oct 11, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

hellotomyrars wrote: post #55

It's bad for Apple to take a cut of our money and to compete with our service and it's best for the users if they can't do that. We don't want the users to be able to easily shift from our platform to anyone else's, though. That's bad! (Obviously the corporate interests only align with the consumer interest when it serves the bottom line of the corporation.)

I'm on Google Play Music and won't move to Youtube music because it's awful, and Shopify was my preferred destination until today. But seeing how hard they make it for users to move out, I'm not interested anymore.

At least Google Takeout allows me to export my GPM data very easily.