When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time.
The biggest change I personally suffered from is when they pulled out of their integration with Djay, a DJ app. This integration was amazing for bedroom DJs like myself, being able to use Spotify to organize DJ music and DJ directly from it. Then they sunset the entire integration.
Now Djay and even bigger apps like Pioneer Rekordbox integrate with Tidal... Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own?
> When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time.
This is somewhat tangential, but I feel like this happens often, as internal power and culture shifts away from being developer-driven to consumer- or manager-driven.
This doesn't happen for every company, thankfully.
> Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own?
Yes, labels and artists get a bigger cut of the subscription cost from Tidal. And before the buy-out by Square last year, Tidal's parent company was majority-owned by Jay-Z and had lots of buy-in from music industry insiders.
Tidal was basically a music streaming platform made by the music industry itself to have some leverage in negotiations with Spotify / Alphabet / Apple / Amazon.
It's since evolved into something else, but it's not surprising that Tidal can get some unique deals due to its close industry ties.
Back when I worked at a competitor that got pushed aside by Spotify, the internal narrative was that the labels would always give a good deal to a young company, then turn the screws on them while giving good deals to a younger competitor, so that they could keep everyone small and preserve the idea that there was an alternative to piracy without risking any real changes to their business.
I think the integration was initially scrapped due to problems with licensing (streams <30s don't result in a payout, and after that 100% payout; so it's either unfair or expensive under the current model). Good question about why they're leaving the space to their competitors.
> Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own?
Me, being a naive speculator: Maybe it has something to do with the time. The original contracts between spotify + labels were probably written 15 years ago. Over time they might have changed numbers like how big spotify's cut is, but never revised the rest of the blueprint contracts.
I used to work in music and had to deal with requirements forced on us by labels and such. Those contracts aren't "written 15 years ago and barely revisited" music industry lawyers wouldn't leave a stone unturned of turning it will benefit their client.
Labels do prefer Tidal because it's a service made by the music industry. However, Spotify is lacking features it used to have because they are product driven and such integrations are not on product people's radar (like you said - lazy and don't care).
That is who they always blame, but it is just a ploy. Like netflix, the dominant player always wants control
Remember when Netflix first started they had amazing API's and all kinds of cool things where built off them, then one day they got big enough and shut them all down, of course they claim it was the "evil industry" that made them do it, but I simply do not believe them, nor do I believe spotify.
This pattern has been repeated over and over since the dawn of the internet, Early Platform is open, and dev focused to bring people in, then over time they wall off the garden to only their apps...
Google, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and countless others all follow this pattern.
Your assumption is correct. The record labels are their business partners. Spotify does not dictate the terms while the record labels hold all the popular content.
Qobuz and Tidal both have developer friendly APIs. You can absolutely build your own client.
Roon will index either or both of them with your local mp3 library. It decorates with third-party metadata services, and will stream hi-res to almost any hardware device you can throw at it.
> Qobuz and Tidal both have developer friendly APIs.
Last time I looked, Tidal didn't offer a public API. They were 100% closed and developer unfriendly. You had to "borrow" their client ID for use with reverse engineered clients. Has this changed? If so can you link to the docs please?
I guarantee you any company doing what Spotify does would love to cut out the middleman.
The problem is that middleman owns near-everything your users want.
They hold all the cards, they can just say "hey, either you do X or you don't get our music library" and now your customers don't have ~95% music library they wanted.
I'd wager Spotify's reluctance to "just let you listen to fucking music" might be related to that, if it was just API you could integrate with any player you could make indie-only Spotify equivalent that just... uses Spotify API to play whatever is not on it.
My naive assumption is that Spotify would love to, but the record labels don't agree.