The State of Spotify Web API Report 2025

Understanding Spotify's new API restrictions and finding practical alternatives.

Intro

On May 15, 2025, Spotify updated the criteria for Web API extended access, the process which determines if a Spotify app built on the Web API can come out of development mode (limited to 25 test users) and be offered publicly to a larger group of users. If you do not meet this steep new criteria, the Web API is now mostly limited to experimentation and personal use. As someone who has developed many artist campaigns and software projects using the Web API, I wanted to take a moment to talk about these changes. Naturally, I thought about complaining but... that doesn't really help anyone. Instead, I've decided to speak to how this platform has inspired my work in the past and share potential alternatives as we look to the future. This report is specifically about the Spotify Web API, Web Playback SDK, and Embeds. It does not cover any other Spotify Platform products. In addition to suggestions for you, I have a few suggestions for Spotify and other companies offering Music APIs. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this report. Please share it if you find it useful and if you have any feedback, please get in touch.

— Lee Martin

Disclaimer: I do not work for Spotify and all opinions and suggestions expressed are my own.

Brief History

We, the computer geeks at Spotify, also love cool software. To that end, we’re trying to open up our platform to enable third party application development on top of the Spotify platform. These pages are our first baby steps toward that goal.

I had to use the Way Back Machine to find this quote on the Spotify Developer site from 2009. Through my participation in Music Hack Day, I had the chance to meet some of the people who would eventually build this platform. I mention this to acknowledge that this API's existence was never guaranteed, it happened because people believed in API enablement and inspiration. The reason we mourn these changes is because it was really well done.

My first major project using the Spotify Web API was a playlist generator for the band Khruangbin. The idea behind the app was to help users generate playlists for an upcoming flight. Khruangbin provided a pool of funky tracks and the user provided their flight details and preferences. Coffee or tea? Aisle or window? These preferences were mapped to Spotify audio features and helped determine which songs from the pool should be used. For example, coffee drinkers got high energy tracks, while tea drinkers got low energy tracks. It was fun, useful, and only something the Spotify Web API could pull off.

Since then, I've developed numerous activations and apps using the Web API and have had a lot of fun doing so. In fact, a case study from a Shania Twain campaign back in 2023 is the last thing the Spotify Developer platform's Twitter account ever shared. Things were looking up then but the times, they are a-changin'.

New Requirements

In order to transition an app from development mode to extended quota mode, developers must submit their application for review. Previously, this review process was open to any individual but now, Spotify only accepts applications from established business entities, whose implementation meets a very specific set of requirements:

  1. The business entity must be a legally registered business or organization.
  2. The business must be operating an active and launched service.
  3. The service must be maintaining a minimum of 250,000 monthly active users.
  4. The service must be available in key Spotify markets
  5. The service must prove commercial viability
  6. The service must adhere to Terms

Anything jump out at you? 250,000 MAUs. This means that you need to have a massively successful app before seeking an integration with the Spotify Web API. In plain terms, that means your service should be successful without Spotify and only then should you be aiming to integrate Spotify with it. In my opinion, if you're thinking about building a new service which relies on Spotify, you should think twice. Spotify continues:

Eligibility criteria may change over time. Spotify makes no promise or guarantee that extended access requests will get approved.

We strongly advise that you start integrating the Web API into an application intended for an audience of more than 25 authenticated Spotify users only after Spotify has agreed to this application in writing.

Spotify doesn't mince words. They have final say on approvals. Read the Developer Policy thoroughly before making any investment.

I've built Spotify powered activations for major artists but even they can't prove 250k MAU. Under these requirements, I would no longer be able to build Spotify Web API powered artist campaigns which require user authentication. And therein lies the issue: Spotify is ending support for those apps that live somewhere between a personal project and an enterprise project.

I should mention that if your app doesn't require user authentication, you should be able to continue to use some aspects of the Spotify Web API using client credentials but you should still be aware of the development mode limitations.

Feature Alternatives

If your application requires user authentication and is affected by the new requirements, you'll need to get creative or look elsewhere. Let me walk through key Web API features, how they inspired me, and what you can do instead.

Web API search requires authentication. That means if you're looking for a track, album, artist, or playlist, you'll need to be authenticated. Since you won't be able to search on behalf of a user, you can look towards using client credentials instead. In order to combat development mode rate limits, you'll also want to look at caching data.

One viable alternative for music searching is the ancient iTunes Search API. This API does not require any authentication and will return a lot of the same basic metadata you'd expect from Spotify. In addition, most tracks will have an ISRC, which you can use to cross-reference with the Spotify platform and other music APIs. Also, Apple Music still provides audio previews which Spotify deprecated last year.

I once used the Web API search endpoint to develop a search feature into an early 2000s inspired mixtape generator for the Plain White T's. By adjusting the year parameter to 2000-2010, the search would only return tracks from this era, leading to very nostalgic results.

Likes and Follows

Authentication is required to like a track or follow an artist using the Web API. Without it, your best recourse is simply linking to the associated pages on Spotify. Previously, Spotify had a follow button which was pre-authenticated but they deprecated it back in 2021. Since the Web API was suggested as an alternative, Spotify should reconsider embed solutions for these touchpoints.

Audio Features

I wrote about the deprecation of Audio Features last year. This was a massive blow to what made the Spotify Web API truly unique and now we know it was the sign of things to come. I used Audio Features for so many things including a Sadboi Detector I developed for Illenium. That application analyzed a user's listening history or a provided playlist and determined how sad it was by examining each track's Valence. Spotify deprecated this feature, alongside Recommendations and Related Artists, because they were concerned developers would use it to train AI models.

While I haven't done much building around audio classification this year, I've been eyeing Cyanite as a potential alternative to Audio Features. Cyanite's business is analyzing the emotions of music and offers all of the measurements the Spotify Web API previously provided alongside even more data. Depending on your use case, audio classification in general is worth exploring as it becomes more mainstream with AI.

Playlist Creation

I already mentioned one playlist generator for Khruangbin but I created multiple with the Web API, including another for Khruangbin during the pandemic called Shelter in Space. Playlist generators work particularly well when an artist or curator can bring a particular vibe to the pool of potential songs.

Since creating a playlist and adding tracks requires authentication, we need to look elsewhere for a solution. Depending on your use case, you may be able to manually create the playlist or a series of playlists and serve them up thematically. The Apple Music API is still very good at creating playlists and that can be accomplished using MusicKit on the web.

If still you want to create an application that builds playlists dynamically and saves them to Spotify, you may need a 3rd party solution. I haven't used or tested TuneMyMusic, but this service allows users to create a playlist from a text file. If your service can generate a text file of tracks, your users could import it via a 3rd party solution (or recreate it manually). I kinda recall building a text file export or playlist tracks into one of my client apps. Maybe it was the Tycho Weather playlist generator?

This raises an interesting point: there may be existing Spotify apps with extended quota access that can bridge the gap. However, thoroughly vet any 3rd party service before sending your users there.

Web Playback

Being a web developer for over two decades means I was able to see a lot of new features adopted by browsers and as soon as feature parity was met, I was able to roll them into my client projects. I felt the same way about the Music APIs and I kept a little spreadsheet which tracked when Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer inched closer to providing full track streaming via their API to authenticated users. It was a great day when all of these finally turned green.

With this functionality, I built a Spotify and Apple Music powered A/B player for R.E.M., which allowed fans to jump between the original and new mix of Monster seamlessly. I also built an app called Listening Party which allows artists to throw parties around their music.

Deezer has deprecated their custom player library and with these new Spotify requirements, that leaves Apple Music as the only viable option of the three for authenticated playback. However, you can also look into SoundCloud or just rolling something custom.

Spotify also has an embed (potentially with an authenticated Spotify user) and a complimentary iFrame API, similar to YouTube. However, unlike YouTube, the iFrame API isn't very customizable. With the Web Playback SDK now being out of reach, I recommend Spotify consider a chromeless iFrame API for more customizable integrations.

Listening History

One of the most popular features of the Spotify Web API is the ability to read the users top tracks or artists in three different time ranges: last 4 weeks, last 6 months, and all time. It's sort of a simplified version of Spotify Wrapped. I used this feature to generate Waffle House receipts for Jonas Brothers, mail postcards to Noah Kahan fans, and grow a virtual plant for Joy Oladokun, among countless other activations. Not having the ability to integrate this feature into an application that has more than 25 users is hard to stomach but there are ways forward.

Apple Music offers an alternative. While not as detailed as Spotify's data, you can check what's in heavy rotation on a user's account. I also noticed a new endpoint called replay data which summarizes the data from Apple Music Replay, their answer to Spotify Wrapped. That's something the Spotify Web API never provided!

What we really need is a platform-agnostic way to keep track of plays. Did someone say scrobbling? God, I miss last.fm. By the way, did you know you can export your extended streaming history from Spotify? It takes up to 30 days but you can download your data in case you ever switch services or simply want to build something interesting around your listening history.

Future Possibilities

Unless Spotify changes their mind, we'll need to adapt to these limitations. I haven't developed any Spotify Web API powered apps this year because my clients didn't ask for any. Sign of the times? However, I did build an activation for Lil Poppa which suggests a song off his new album based on the results of an AI-powered therapy session. On this app we simply linked to the song on Spotify. No integration needed. I wrote a little bit about this and using AI to bridge the gaps of these missing features.

I've been using my YouTube channel to research new technologies like AI and automation for creative marketing in music. While researching, I noticed something interesting: Spotify has granted extended quota access to some AI and agentic platforms. This means you can develop agentic flows that interact with your Spotify account. This doesn't necessarily solve the issues outlined in this report but it may offer a glimpse at a near future where Spotify and other DSPs are integrated with these platforms, allowing for custom applications.

Check out my video introduction to AI Agents to see how I use Spotify in a custom flow, and take a look at OpenAI's new Apps SDK which integrates Spotify. I'll be keeping an eye on these developments so please subscribe if you're interested.

Conclusion

Relying on and investing ourselves into other platforms to achieve things online has always been a risky endeavor. Platforms change, adjust their terms, shut down, and all you're left with is whatever value you were able to extract and make defensible elsewhere. To be a web developer is to be malleable. You need to be constantly looking for new ways to achieve solutions to your problems. These changes by Spotify might be hard to process at the moment, but I see them as the latest in a series of hard lessons about web development. Instead of letting it get me down, I embrace the web's evolution and accept the challenge of looking for new solutions. I hope this report helps you, and I can't wait to see what you build. Thanks for reading.

About

Lee Martin is a creative developer who has largely worked in music for the last two decades. He previously worked at Silva Artist Management, SoundCloud, and Songkick. Currently he is a freelancer who builds creative marketing campaigns for some of the biggest and smallest names in music. In addition, he maintains several software projects including Turn, Vinyl Mockup, and Listening Party. He publishes a newsletter called Netmaker and is publicly exploring the world of AI/Automation on his YouTube channel.

Questions? Found an issue? Get in touch