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Build your own Spotify API

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Last month I attended the first music hack day, held at the Guardian offices in London. It was a great event, even though it was very frustrating that I couldn’t finish my hack in time (tip: don’t use unfamiliar languages/technologies if you just want to get stuff done, doh). One the web site of the event it says:

European music sites are revolutionising the music industry, not least with their eagerness to open up their data with APIs.

The idea of taking a bunch of existing (music) services to create something entirely new is great and only possible because web APIs have become the norm. We just expect services we entrust with our data to give us access to their API. For me it has become an important box to tick before signing up to a new service (does it have an API? is it useful? etc).

The companies involved at music hack day all offer APIs. My favourite moment of the weekend: I asked about a particular feature in Songkick’s API in the #musichackday irc channel. A couple of minutes later Phil Cowan (Songkick CTO) stands next to me and asks what data I needed to get out of their API. I explain it to him, he walks off and an hour later the requested geodata was made available in their API!

One notable European music company missing at hack day was Spotify. Since the Swedish company launched their ad-supported streaming service end of last year it has at times been labeled as “game-changer” of the music business or otherwise as “iTunes killer”. A slick interface and fast P2P streaming makes accessing remote music on-demand indistinguishable from a locally stored music library.

Spotify is in many ways a very untypical, almost unfashionable application: it sits on the desktop, there is no “social” angle to it, no “friends” to follow, the only feature which comes close are collaborative playlists which can be shared with other listeners. A couple of websites have been created to fill in the gaps, for example Share My Playlists where users can post and discuss these playlists. Because Spotify doesn’t offer a web API (there only is libspotify, which is sadly next to useless) users of these sites need to manually copy&paste their playlist into a web form. You want to create a dynamic playlist, say by consuming data from another music service API? Sorry. Impossible.

From a technical perspective Spotify’s decisions are understandable: a proprietary desktop client offers more control, especially given that their business model is based on advertising which needs to be displayed to the user. Of course, this didn’t stop some members of #hack.se from reverse-engineering the P2P-protocol. So earlier this year despotify was released, an open-source (C-based) library which made it possible to access Spotify’s service without the official client. Spotify reacted by blocking free (ad-supported) despotify users. However, the success of despotify encouraged more people to get involved in reverse-engineering - there are now at least three different active projects.

While writing my last blog post (100 records…) I spent most of the time manually searching Spotify URLs for the albums and artists in the playlists, a boring job a program could have done in a matter of seconds.

So I took another look at the existing open-source libraries and found jotify, which is currently the most advanced implementation (it supports the feature I was looking for, creation of playlists). It is written in Java, so it was very easy to use integrate in JRuby. I decided to use sinatra to give it a rest-based API so it can be used from other services. The result is spotify-api, a JSON-speaking API for spotify. Like despotify it needs a premium account to work, but I’m happy to pay for a service without ads and an API.

The API is not complete and it’s the first release, but it’s all there is until the “official” API arrives (if it does at all, it has been announced/promised for quite a while now…the delay is most likely due to political, not technical reasons).

Update (04/05/2010)

At the last music hack day in Amsterdam Spotify (which were present this time) announced the new playlist API and ran a session to get feedback from potential users. Nice! You can find their current progress on github: playlist-api. So it looks like this hack won’t be needed for much longer.

Update (16/12/2010)

Sadly, Spotify still has no API. There is some discussion on the issue tracker.

Update (16/06/2011)

Guess what? Still no API. However I got pointed to a new Spotify API server project (spotify-api-server) which wraps libspotify and has playlist support.