Spotify: Updating the Criteria for Web API Extended Access

[michaelb1103]

Spotify recently announced changes to their API extended access and I'm wondering if you qualify as "apps with established, scalable, and impactful use cases"? I ask because I am not, or at least cannot access any of their audio features as of April 21. :)

https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2025-04-15-updating-the-criteria-for-web-api-extended-access

[pavelkomarov]

I have had extended quota access since 2019. I was mildly freaked out when I saw they were changing things, but as far as I could tell, they weren't changing access for apps already granted the extension.

I just tried it and am getting audio features. Did you by chance have the tab open from last week? I recently introduced and then later fixed a bug that caused those columns to be empty #85. It's possible your page had out-of-date javascript.

[michaelb1103]

Thanks for the feedback! I literally just started work on a project this weekend. API and auth was working, I could pull track info (artist, song, etc) but audio features failed every time. Was pulling my hair out for a day, then found the article I linked. My guess is they maybe just started implementing their new rules a little early. Either way, I'm glad exportify is still up and running!

[pavelkomarov]

Oh, I see. It's not that you couldn't access that data through my app, rather you couldn't access it through your own.

The auth process is pretty involved now that they're making us move to PKCE. Got an email about it and made a PR here a couple weeks ago. Their code examples on the how-to page are way more verbose than necessary; I pared it all down in my onload and authorize functions and left a massive code comment. I've also got a generally useful apiCall function. Hoping all that can be helpful to other creators.

But if they're blocking certain endpoints unless you were already granted extended quota mode before a certain date, or unless you can present them with a case it's beneficial to them and the musicians to allow access, that hobbles developers in a big way going forward. Seems like they just want to keep cloud costs down, honestly. They should fix #62.

I bet the real worry is people pulling a large volume of those features to feed data-hungry ML. Besides, they already have a recommender engine and don't want competition.

[michaelb1103]

Exactly. Sorry for freaking you out :/ My longer-term concern was that exportify might get swept up in these rule changes, at which point, I'd be fucked! lol Anyway, thanks again for your response and this cool tool!

[pavelkomarov]

The features are really cool for the kind of data science I did. There's also "audio analysis", which has even more info about rhythm and timbre and such, added long after I first built this app and somewhat redundant with the features, so I never got around to including.

You can see how their recommendations can be so powerful. It particularly motivated me to try to keep cross-pollinating my Maybe playlist so that I don't get stuck in a bubble like happens across many websites in many domains of life now.

[michaelb1103]

Very cool! I have this opinion that algorithmic playlist generation and recommendation are inherently dull - popularity pushes everything towards the top of the bell curve, but innovation is always towards the ends. It's unfortunate that Spotify doesn't let users directly access a lot of these song features through "filters" or other settings. Anyway, my playlist experiment was based on the removal of popularity and even genre, to just focus on the "qualities" of the music. I had some interesting results - a few were pretty stellar, but most were just okay - I can manually make better lists. Our CTO is a former musician and we talked a lot about the results I was getting - I'm a Roon user, but I'd share the results I could as Spotify playlists. Anyway, our biggest takeaway was that curation is the critical component. The fact that I wasn't processing millions of songs is why my playlists were good. Taste is very subjective and it's very difficult to quantify. I may actually try to do my own analysis using librosa + essentia + madmom. Or not, as the weather gets nicer! :)