Man, this kind of sucks.
I wrote a nifty script a few years ago that pulls the popularity metric of a song, converts that to a star rating, and writes that to a tag with Mutagen. At a glance I can see the hits. If I like the track, I’ll “love” it (side stepping the need for a personal rating). It’s a system that’s been serving me well for a long time.
Locking down APIs does seem to be the trend. I’m not sure I’ll look to adapt.
Giving money to Spotify is out of the question, but I may pay for Deezer or something.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
This is going to become more of a standard due to people vibecoding their own clients for every dumb thing.
mrdown@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
It’s all about profits and psying major labels even.more
spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Even the Spotify shuffle feature is built to maximize profits and to hell with the user experience.
I have almost 2 thousand songs on one playlist and Spotify plays the songs from minor artists (who don’t get paid much) constantly, while songs from major artists (who get paid a lot more) are never played. I’m actually surprised to hear those songs when shuffle is turned off.
They’ve also recently added “Video Episodes for You” to my home screen with no way to turn it off. It takes up 1/3 of the screen with helpful titles like “Session 105, Hillory Duff”, and “Reinvent Life from Rock Bottom and Become Unrecognizable.” I have never watched a video or listened to a podcast on Spotify.
When it comes to enshittification Spotify’s got it down.
Maybe someday one of the other musics service creates their version of Spotify Connect.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I think it’s more about closing a backdoor to free product that was generally out of reach for most people a few years. Free API access for devs has been a thing forever for the most part, but the barriers are now lower for people to abuse it.
Yes about profits in the sense they don’t want people getting free access to content, but I don’t think this is designed to net them a bunch of money or anything.
XLE@piefed.social 17 hours ago
Agreed. To me, this sounds like a continuation of the abolition of Web 2.0, the era where APIs were open and nobody was talking about how they’d pay for it.