Large corporations are on edge over the monopolistic tactics of their opponents. At least a dozen companies call Apple a monopoly and legal action continues. In addition, regulatory commissions of the European Union try to clarify the truth to include new clauses in their laws in order to avoid monopoly on their borders. Spotify is one of those companies against Apple. A few days ago, some developers who use the Spotify API to transfer playlists to other music services have received a wake-up call for the service, ensuring that They have to stop offering the transfer or their access to the Spotify API will be revoked.
Spotify shields its users by blocking the transfer of playlists
When new music streaming services like Play Music or Apple Music emerged, millions of Spotify users decided to leave to venture into a new service. However, they left behind years of compilation of music in their playlists. Playlists that defined not only his being but his tastes and his way of understanding music. That is why tools came to light that were capable of transferring playlists from one music service to another.
One of those tools is SongShift, una app que permitía llevar las listas de reproducción de Spotify a otros servicios de música en streaming. Sin embargo, hace unos días recibieron una notificación por parte del servicio de música asegurando que les revocarían el acceso a su API oficial si no dejaban de permitir la transferencia de playlists:
The Spotify developer platform team reached out and let us know that we would have to remove the transfer of their service to a competing music service or that our API access would be revoked due to a TOS violation. While this is not the news we wanted to hear, we respect your decision.
It is likely that with this move, Spotify wants to shield its users versus the competition. Prevent users from leaving your service to another service such as Apple Music. On the other hand, this news astonishes the experts since the Spotify terms and services were updated in 2018 prohibiting the transfer of playlists. However, two years later it has prohibited this action. Because right now? Is the competition between big services like Apple and Spotify getting stronger? The answer is yes and it is likely that the rules of the game that we have known until now will change.
