Say Hello to Our New Web API

Say Hello to Our New Web API(news.spotify.com)

113 points by Fogh 12 years ago | 41 comments

Soarez 12 years ago |

There's already a node module https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-api

No code of course, just name-hoarding. FOSS can be really ugly sometimes.

secondreality 12 years ago | |

Since I've already made one and it's ready for use, I feel I need to piggyback on your comment to mention it.

https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api-node

mox1 12 years ago |

Just as an FYI to everyone, Spotify does not allow any "commercialization" of their APi's / Platform. (Learned this the hard way when I released my Spotify app for $.99 on the app store).

https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/

joshstrange 12 years ago |

> With a user’s permission, developers can now access user profile information including playlists,

This is awesome news! The last time I tried to write something for Spotify to front-load my last.fm (I know I'm late to the game) account but couldn't get access to the playlists. Going to have to check this out when I get some time.

andyhmltn 12 years ago |

Brilliant! I've been wanting to access my own playlists through an API for a while to back them up

jal278 12 years ago | |

Just hacked this together: http://joellehman.com/playlist/

Which should let you download you playlist in CSV

andyhmltn 12 years ago | | |

Wow that's awesome. I've needed this for ages

jerhinesmith 12 years ago |

What I'd really love (and have looked for in the past) is a way to automatically push a song over to a specific spotify playlist every time I tag a song on shazam (thinking like an IFTTT recipe). It looks like that might be possible with this new api.

jeffasinger 12 years ago | |

Soundhound has a button to search on spotify after finding a song. It's a bunch of clicks, but that's what I do now.

gbrhaz 12 years ago |

I had a quick look, but to play a track, all I can see is a 30 second preview. Am I missing something, or can you not get the track data from this API?

> EDIT: Should've read the first subtitle... "Our Web API lets your applications fetch data from the Spotify music catalog and manage user’s playlists."

adamcik 12 years ago | |

Streaming is only available through libspotify or the beta SDK on IOS. Rumors from #spotify on freenode indicate that the SDK for other platforms is still being worked on. But once it ships it will provide a minimal lib for streaming and the web API will do everything else.

mox1 12 years ago | |

I doubt they are going to let you actually stream music through this, that would be super useful though..

kenver 12 years ago |

I really like Spotify and I love that they're making this API available. But we just saw netflix shutting down their API. Are Spotify committed to keeping this around, or will they just shut it off in a few months when it becomes too much of a pain to manage?

thathonkey 12 years ago | |

I think they hope the API will be used to drive subscriptions to their service. If that ends up being the case, they'll probably keep it around. Of course, nobody can look into the future and see what will happen. Building a business around a public API like this would probably not be a smart move... yet.

eli 12 years ago |

Is there an (easy to use) Spotify plugin to let my office-mates vote on or suggest songs to play next? I know there are some hacky solutions, but this new Web API seems like it should make that a lot easier.

akx 12 years ago | |

We've been using the Soundrop app inside Spotify with a shared room for that. http://soundrop.fm/

houli 12 years ago | |

http://soundrop.fm or http://spartify.com

kingosticks 12 years ago | |

You might find this Spotify jukebox project interesting https://github.com/samcreate/Apollo-Player

thejosh 12 years ago | |

This would be freaking awesome, right now we just use a playlist.

Having an office jukebox powered by Spotify would be awesome, and a great usecase. "VoteSpotify" or something :).

jeffasinger 12 years ago | |

letsparty.fm is something we made, but it's based on rdio, not spotify, since they have easier API access.

jeffasinger 12 years ago | | |

This web API doesn't come close to helping with this problem, as it doesn't allow you to play entire songs, or know when the current song is over.

Realized I didn't make it a link. http://letsparty.fm

joshvm 12 years ago |

Would it kill them to fix some of the bugs in the desktop application first? You can't even sort search results any more. This is apparently marked as a "not now" concern. A lot of premium customers are deeply unsatisfied with the way Spotify handled their latest update.

joshmn 12 years ago |

Personally this is great timing for some of the features I'm needing to develop http://Listen2EDM.com further. I'm sure that music discovery, and the music community in general, will greatly benefit from this!

guilhermesad 12 years ago |

I've just pushed a ruby wrapper for it: https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify Any contributions would be very welcomed!

m_gloeckl 12 years ago |

This sounds great, indeed. With a listening history on last.fm that reaches back to early 2009, I always thought it would be great to have a service to use the last.fm data to build dynamic playlists for spotify.

adamcik 12 years ago | |

Populate a http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html with the listening history and you can use it for dynamic playlisting using the spotify catalog. That is as long as echonest matches the song metadata to an id.

http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/ linked from the demos shows this for artists as a seed, but tasteprofiles as the station seed works nicely as well :-)

m_gloeckl 12 years ago | | |

Wow, that looks great. Thanks for the link!

x3ro 12 years ago |

It doesn't seem possible to delete a playlist or remove tracks from one :( Other than that it's pretty great, maybe I can automate my playlist management now :)

adamcik 12 years ago | |

Same conclusion we also had in https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139 when looking at if we should move away from libspotify in favor of the new web API. For now I would stick with libspotify wrappers until a more complete version of the API comes out.

instanttaylor 12 years ago |

I was hoping they'd have a Radio API so Sonos and others could make a better all around experience.

Maybe I missed it... or maybe it doesn't exist.

thesimon 12 years ago |

Still no access to the current playing track which means I have to continue using last.fm which feels a bit hacky :/

nuclear_eclipse 12 years ago | |

You can get that via dbus from the machine running Spotify. Check out my spotify-gnome wrapper script at https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome

Basically, you write a simple dbus app that listens for the appropriate song-changed signals from Spotify, and then do with that as you wish. This might not be as easy on Mac or Windows though, as I've only ever used it on Linux.

relaytheurgency 12 years ago | |

Any idea why they don't allow this? There are a lot of cool possibilities that could arise from that info.

Kiro 12 years ago |

Can you access the API without authenticating? I just want some basic song info, not play anything.

thathonkey 12 years ago | |

You could have spent the 5 minutes on their website that I did to find the endpoint reference which shows that yes, you can get to quite a bit of the API without authenticating:

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/

nsxwolf 12 years ago |

I wonder how long this will last.

ivraatiems 12 years ago | |

Probably just long enough for them to make a too-polite-to-be-ironic "thank you for using our development environment" blog post where they shut it down and shunt what's left to a private API for the apps they're currently trying to acquire.

drsounds 12 years ago |

My boss let me spend this workday with studying the new api

OutThisLife 12 years ago | |

"let"

imdsm 12 years ago |

Insane. I was speaking about Spotify API about an hour ago on IRC, Google'd around, found this, disregarded it (how new can it be?) and now it's at the top of HN.

This keeps happening to me, with docker release, with deis, with vagrant, so many things I talk about and then I look at hn and they're there, just waiting for me.

This happens so often, we all say here to check HN after we discuss something, because there will no doubt be a link ready for us. Starting to wonder if this is actually just a news feed where you see what you need to see.

coob 12 years ago | |

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequ...