In an unexpected move, Spotify has reached out to SongShift, a music transfer service, and threatened to revoke their API access if they do not stop supporting music transfers from Spotify to competing services like Apple Music and Deezer. SongShift allows users to migrate their music between different music streaming services while keeping their music library intact.
SongShift team posted the following on their blog earlier:
The Spotify Developer Platform Team reached out and let us know we'd need to remove transferring from their service to a competing music service or have our API access revoked due to TOS violation. While this is not the news we wanted to hear, we respect their decision.
The irony is that Spotify's privacy policy, as noted by a Redditor, supports the right to data portability. This means that Spotify is supposed to honor customer requests to freely move their data from Spotify to competing services, without any hindrance from the company.
“Right to data portability - the right to request a copy of your personal data in electronic format and the right to transmit that personal data for use in another party’s service”
For SongShift, this means that they will not be supporting transfer to Spotify in any future updates. Users can still use the service to migrate data between other services which include Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube Music, Pandora, Last.fm, and many more.
Our Take
As Spotify is disallowing data from its service to be moved to competing services, it is really going against the principles it stands for when it talks about Apple's policies being anti-competitive. This is the same company that is a founding member of the 'Coalition for App Fairness', and has been quite vocal against its biggest competitor, Apple.
Spotify is the biggest music streaming service at the moment, with Apple being a close second. This type of behavior should not be expected from the service when it already has other issues to deal with. It faces tons of complaints from customers to improve its app and mend its relationship with music creators by increasing their royalty payments.
It'll be interesting to see what Spotify's public statement will be on this matter.
The post Spotify Blocks SongShift From Allowing Song Transfers To Other Services Like Apple Music by Imran Hussain appeared first on Wccftech.
source https://wccftech.com/spotify-blocks-songshift-from-allowing-song-transfers-to-other-services-like-apple-music/