ATTENTION: Are you a Spotify User? Spotify disabled on Mycroft

For no reason we can desern, Spotify has disabled Mycroft’s API access. This was used to search their library so that Mycroft users who have paid Spotify accounts can access the music they are paying for.

We’ve been trying to get in touch with someone at Spotify who can clarify their policy, but have not been able to get a reply.

If you have a paid account, please open a support ticket with Spotify, then get up on Twitter and let @SpotifyCares know that you pay for an account and want to access it on your smart speaker.

We’re investigating changing our default music player to Deezer going forward and this may accelerate that change.

If you know anyone at Spotify, please reach out and see if we can get in touch. This might be a misunderstanding, but it should be noted that they had to actively reach in and disable our service, so whatever is going on, it is probably intentional.

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If you use Spotify, or want to help those who do, you can consider liking this post:

After contacting Spotify directly, I was told that the only way to have a change made to Spotify is to have it garner enough attention in the community section. I do not like this option, and as this is not a feature, it seems like it should not need requesting in the same way, but it looks like this is at least a way that the average user can help.

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This sucks… Spotify is one of my main applications for a language assistant.
I don’t understand why they block access for paid users. These are just additional reasons to cancel the subscription. :frowning:

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As a premium paid user I sent in a request for us

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I made it to Tier 3 tech support and I am awaiting an email. I suggested to them that, if this was purposefully disabled, they will likely lose a lot of premium customers, and that someone from their management team should be brought into the discussion.

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Let me know if you need any information to help the case (I’m the maintainer of the spotify skill)

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Sorry to be simple here but is it not the case that someone owns the api access via the https://developer.spotify.com/ and has either deleted it or someone else needs to re-create it?

I owned it. I got notice from Spotify that they would disable it. then they disabled it and now it’s not usable anymore. I can create a new one but as it’s technically breaking the terms of service it’ll just get disabled again (at some point in time, when they realize it’s a violation).

A new api key can easily be created. Right now I’m sort of waiting for response from Spotify’s official channels about getting permission (have applied previously a couple of times and been rejected so I’m not hopeful) just in case.

After that maybe just doing it…

Thank you very much for the update. This gives a great bit of background.

Other apps I have used have given users details on how they create their own app in the developers dashboard and add the Client ID and Client Secret to their local application. Would that work in this case?

Thank you for your hard work on this

I’m actually working on adding support for just that. :+1:

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Can you briefly explain how/why there is a ToS violation?

Spotify doesn’t allow using their API for voice integrations without written authorization. Either I missed this when I signed up or it wasn’t in the TOS back in 2017 when I registered the app.

Any news on the issue?

Spotify connection was an important part for me while building my Mycroft.

If voice control is not a must have, install spotifyd then your device just pops up as spotify-connect device to which you can still throw you music to with the spotify app.

I’ve always been upset with Spotify. I paid for a premium account early on and used open source software. Pandora is much more friendly to open source I find. Perhaps because they need the money.
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Yeah, I can cast music to it, but I really would like voice control, I guess I have to send a mail to Spotify :frowning:

So, I had a chat with someone on Spotify support, and although I don’t think he works with the technical stuff himself, he promised to send the question further.

I also invited him (or the Spotify person looking into this) to join this forum to follow our discussion.

I got the feeling that he really was going to take this further, so hopefully something will happen in the future

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Thanks for doing that. I’m in the process of re-applying for becoming a “hardware partner” to get official permission to use the api for voice, let’s see if that application goes through this time.

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I hope it will work out for you, I actually know a person working for spotify, don’t know whith what though, but if needed, I might ask who should be contacted to get things happening.

I asked for a Swedish speaking tech in the support chat, and that person actually sounded like he could walk down the hall and talk to the people who knew stuff about this.

If there ever will be a commersial Mycroft to buy, it’s pretty important that stuff like this works out of the box, so you are doing important work here.

Hey Forslund, any news from Spotify yet?

A friend of mine just dropped some music on spotify, so I came to think of this again.