from Hacker News

FreeYourMusic lets users migrate their playlists off Spotify

by bartoszhernas on 10/14/20, 10:30 AM with 262 comments

  • by zoltar on 10/14/20, 1:15 PM

    I think something like this still works with a client id, secret, and a playlist:

      TOKEN=$(curl --basic --user $ID:$SECRET -X POST -d grant_type=client_credentials https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token | jq -r .access_token)
  curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" https://api.spotify.com/v1/playlists/$PLAYLIST/tracks | tee playlist-$PLAYLIST.json | jq -rc '.items[].track | "\(.artists[0].name) -- \(.name)"' | sort

  • by slothtrop on 10/14/20, 6:37 PM

    This, on top of songs disappearing from my playlists, rendered unavailable.

    I organize everything in foobar now, both local music and streaming playlists with the help of extensions. You can add Youtube sources to your playlists. Even if the links break, you can automatically fix them, keep the name and structure. Have not tried the app versions.

  • by CravingLogic on 10/14/20, 1:29 PM

    If you just want a csv of all your playlists right now, instead of potentially "30 days". This repo works well.

    https://github.com/pavel-aicradle/exportify

  • by harsha930 on 10/14/20, 1:39 PM

    Spotify is so much better than apple music, and this is probably minimal compared to what apple music does to convert/retain users from Spotify.

    Think of all the barriers apple music has created (apple watch app for a long time was the only one that supported offline, apple music is preinstalled, when you hit play and no apps are currently playing it will go to apple music, probably much more).

    My main thought though is that Spotify is much better anyway, why give people the ability to export their curated playlists and use somewhere else. They’ve built that service that helped you discover all those songs — if you created all those playlists from scratch with no help from Spotify’s algorithm (discover/recommendations) good for you but I doubt that’s most people.

  • by Hnrobert42 on 10/14/20, 12:37 PM

    This seems less like an article and more like an advertisement.

  • by selykg on 10/14/20, 1:07 PM

    I'm one of those speak with my wallet kind of people. So when I seen news of this yesterday I wrote into their support saying I was not pleased with it.

    Their response was some random canned response about how you can still export your data. I'm not a fan of lock in, and I'm even less thrilled about not actually responding to my actual questions and instead giving me some canned BS.

    I responded back telling them thanks for not even reading my question and responding with a canned response, then asked for instructions on how to delete my account. I haven't heard back. For what it's worth I wasn't rude in any of this, I was straight and to the point, but I was not rude. Now they seem to be simply ignoring me.

    I'm definitely not spending my money with this service any more. I used to feel a tiny bit sad for them competing with Apple and their whole complaint against Apple and payment stuff. But after seeing this shitty set of responses from them I just no longer care, it feels like they've brought at least some of this on themselves.

    As a sidenote, I'm sort of fed up with customer support in general these days. Snippeted answers are great when they make sense. I.e. a user is asking a simple question, you can take the approach of some personalization sprinkled with snippets to make your life easier and your messaging more consistent. But when you have an unhappy, or upset customer, the last thing you should do is throw in some canned response that doesn't even address their concerns.

  • by crazygringo on 10/14/20, 9:07 PM

    So if people are hating on Spotify now...

    ...what's the alternative? People hate Google, they hate Amazon... I remember people used to hate Apple Music years ago because it was missing tons of basic functionality.

    Is it better? Is Apple Music the "accepted" streaming platform now? Do they all suck in their own way? Or is there another platform that's the good one now?

  • by Confiks on 10/14/20, 2:23 PM

    So the other day Spotify decided to block API access to SongShift [1], which used their API to transfer playlists to other services. By doing that, they removed a method which was valid under GDPR article 20 subsection 2 to transfer personal data directly from one controller to another. FreeYouMusic is using another process without cooperation or consent from Spotify, and doesn't include all personal data.

    I've been exchanging emails with Spotify to demand that they re-enable the API or allow for some other method to transfer my personal data directly to another controller. So far they've just sent me boilerplate back telling me about their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process. You can read the full conversation here [2].

    I fully intend to file a complaint with the Dutch civil court if they don't allow me to exercise my rights under the law. It would be good to have some precedent here. As they've already shown it to be technically feasible (a requirement of the law), and enabling the process is literally a boolean away, I think such a complaint would have a high chance of success.

    Additionally, in my opinion their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process is currently also in violation, because they take up to 30 days (counting 2 now) before emailing you the ZIP with your personal data. This is arguably "undue delay" (which is prohibited under the GDPR). If it comes to a case, removing this delay will certainly be part of the demands.

    [1] https://songshift.com/blog/spotify_transfers

    [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371

  • by syshum on 10/14/20, 1:11 PM

    Spotify has followed the same model as many other companies, like Netflix

    They are open with data, have good API's etc until they get market dominance then they stop supporting many of those same things.

    They have dropped their support for Linux Clients, they closed most of their API's, and various other things

    It is a repeating pattern with companies that are disrupting a market

  • by csunbird on 10/14/20, 12:42 PM

    Funnily, they recommend Spotify as the best music streaming platform here:

    https://freeyourmusic.com/en/blog/best-music-streaming-platf...

  • by DangerousPie on 10/14/20, 12:40 PM

    I have been looking to move away from Spotify for a while now due to their lacklustre support for iOS devices. Is there a good comparison between Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music somewhere, especially in terms of their coverage?

  • by InfinityByTen on 10/14/20, 2:45 PM

  • by tapland on 10/14/20, 12:38 PM

    There are some problems like this that I’ve ended up solving with a scrolling capture screenshot (ShareX on Windows) and the first fitting google result for an OCR service.

  • by fsflover on 10/14/20, 1:47 PM

    Consider using bandcamp.com if you want to "vote with your wallet".

  • by adnanh on 10/14/20, 1:16 PM

    Funny how they didn't vet the generated content: https://freeyourmusic.com/en/transfer-spotify-to-spotify

  • by therealmarv on 10/14/20, 1:25 PM

    Any github repositories and code which provide Spotify playlist->txt/csv/json/xml ?

    ANSWER to myself: Seems there is at least a simple drag&drop solution with the select all on desktop app -> LibreOffice https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-export-my-Spotify-playlist-as...

  • by codazoda on 10/14/20, 6:20 PM

    This exact problem has prevented me from creating playlists in the first place. I'm a non-iphone Apple Music user, but the same still applies. I have no playlists because I assume I'll lose all that curation work someday. So, I just don't do it.

    I wonder how many others are the same way and how that negatively affects their revenue.

  • by blunte on 10/14/20, 12:46 PM

    I haven't studied the fine print on this service, but I wonder about the (high?) value of knowing a person's music tastes in this level of detail. I have hundreds of playlists on spotify, and I bet you can state a lot of things about me by knowing what music I like.

  • by CivBase on 10/14/20, 1:18 PM

    This sort of nonsense is why I switched to a self-hosted Emby media server.

  • by cafed00d on 10/14/20, 5:21 PM

    Can confirm. This app works like a charm.

    I remember attempting to move over from Spotify to Apple Music in 2017. Used some other apps at that time. Didn’t work so well. So I gave up and used Spotify for a few years. And then switched afresh to Apple Music in 2019.

    Today, though, I found freeyourmusic and I was super impressed by their pricing.

    Figured I’d give it a shot and I am convinced this is the best $10 I have ever spent!

  • by marketingPro on 10/14/20, 12:45 PM

    Need this for Google play/youtube music.

    Worst case I use OCR/mechanical turks in the future because I took screenshots.

  • by arthtyagi on 10/15/20, 1:52 AM

    https://soundiiz.com/pricing This gives you exactly what they claim to work on without charging half as much. Basically, it's free if all you wanna do is transfer music.

  • by jscholes on 10/14/20, 8:06 PM

    > As we don’t use the official Spotify SDK, we’re not bound to their Terms of Service.

    I'm not sure how this can be true. Their terms of service specifically ban users from reverse engineering unofficial parts of the product.

    Either way, I'd be interested to know how it actually works.

  • by dawnerd on 10/14/20, 3:22 PM

    I’m just waiting for an open source solution. All these closed source payment requires apps kinda scare me with the permissions they need - Like you just know they’re hacked together scripts that are likely storing and transmitting your tokens in plain text.

  • by Tipewryter on 10/14/20, 12:44 PM

    It would probably be easy to write a bookmarklet that extracts your music into csv.

    Then you can save it and upload it to wherever you like.

    You probably would have to write a second little script to convert the csv into the format of the service you want to upload it to.

  • by tbodt on 10/14/20, 6:32 PM

    > For a limited time, you can redeem the code SPOTIFYSUCKS and get 42.069% off on all plans.

    Nice

  • by antihero on 10/14/20, 4:59 PM

    Damn, just spent a fiver on Soundiiz, which is quite nice in all honesty.

    It did the trick! https://soundiiz.com/

  • by 1zael on 10/14/20, 3:15 PM

    "For a limited time, you can redeem the code SPOTIFYSUCKS and get 42.069% off on all plans." - I applaud, you good sir. I applaud you.

  • by bloak on 10/14/20, 5:56 PM

    I've not used any of these services but I'd be interested to know what the portable identifiers look like. Can anyone explain?

  • by bakerkretzmar on 10/16/20, 4:22 AM

  • by funcDropShadow on 10/14/20, 12:23 PM

    Doesn't the GDPR require that users have the ability to download their data?

  • by quattrofan on 10/14/20, 5:58 PM

    Hilarious. You don't own shit with streaming, if you want to own buy mp3s or CDs and rip. You'll own it and it will sound vastly better especially if it's from a CD.

  • by Vespasian on 10/14/20, 1:58 PM

    I guess I'm lucky that this particular problem is not one that bothers me much.

    My playlists tend to be

    a) quite short ~30 songs I listen on repeat until the mood changes and / or work requires a different rhythm and

    b) are not that many. Only around 10 in active use at any time. I tend to delete older lists to not clutter "my library"

    This leads me to the conclusion that a one time (GDPR) data dump would be sufficient to migrate the data over time.

    Since Music is quite fungible, the one benefit Spotify offers over other services is their recommendation engine which is arguably better than the competition.

  • by xtat on 10/15/20, 1:38 AM

    spotify has chosen the "become you the thing you hate" path

  • by loopdoend on 10/14/20, 12:22 PM

    Perfect, I have been wanting to get off of Spotify ever since they teamed up with Joe Rogan.

  • by pkvlive on 10/15/20, 5:08 AM

    Is it better? Is Apple Music the "accepted" streaming platform now? Do they all suck in their own way? Or is there another platform that's the good one now? Http://pkvlive.com