Spotify restricting API access

[pmcharrison]

https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2024-11-27-changes-to-the-web-api

Seems like many of the API routes that we depend on will be restricted, which is a real shame, and will eliminate many academic uses of this package. These are the affected routes:

• Related Artists
• Recommendations
• Audio Features
• Audio Analysis
• Get Featured Playlists
• Get Category's Playlists
• 30-second preview URLs, in multi-get responses (SimpleTrack object)
• Algorithmic and Spotify-owned editorial playlists

[gbrlrgrs]

get_track_audio_features does not appear to be working as of today

[SchmidtPaul]

get_playlist_tracks() not working either :(

[antaldaniel]

Well, I can only think to draft a letter to Spotify and seek clarity on potential changes to their registration rules.

[pmcharrison]

@antaldaniel In the meantime, I wonder if we can just add a warning message to the README telling users that many of the functions are now broken? I wouldn't mind drafting it if you like.

[antaldaniel]

I already started to review all of them, but indeed it makes more sense in the README, and maybe we can do it in 1-3 rounds if we do not find all at once. Unfortunately the functions are not a 1-1 mapping to the API so there will be unexpected problems, too. Actually, this is all very devastating.

[cjrwebb]

I was really sad to see this news! I teach a data visualisation in R class and we use the spotify audio features quite often as examples that students are usually interested in. Thanks to all the contributors for having made this possible.

I wrote a small script that's in this gist for using spotifyr with the current Spotify API restrictions to get artist tracklists and ids and then using ReccoBeats Database API to download audio features and popularity data. It's probably not a great alternative, but it works for my purpose of getting a static dataset for visualising/modelling the audio features and popularity. I thought I would post this here in case anyone else is in a similar situation and is finding out about the API restrictions now. Apologies if it is too off-topic.

[nickreich]

@cjrwebb Thanks for posting this gist! super helpful. I also have used this as a teaching tool in my data viz class, and thanks to your script, I can continue to do it!