brilliant fantastic //<br>careless spotify
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Finding Gary
🎶🎶🎶
Ain't a lot of boys named Gary these days,
Born with a cigarette glued to their face,
Fixing anything that a hammer can handle,
Gary saves money 'cause Gary don't gamble
🎶🎶🎶
I would of never found out about Stephen Wilson, Jr., his song about Gary, Thunder Jackson, and countless other songs from every genre of music if it weren't for Spotify.
It's the only algorithm that I guard with all my might, 'Dad, play that West Virgina song' be dammed. Not on my algorithm, sister.
🫶 Spotify
First off, 🎶fuck your bitch and the click you claim🎶 let me get this off my chest. Spotify, please use more of your revenue and power to pay the artists that provide you and your company a very lucrative platform. A platform that gives your CEO a salary worth more in one year than one of most successful artists of all time.
Since 2018, I have been using Spotify to discover new music and build my playlists. One playlist per month to hold all the music I discovered that month. I learned this from Ben Brown (although he no longer does this).
I always appreciate the platform's ability to help me discover new music.
It's a blasty to be able to go back, ask your carmates to pick any year and any month and listen to the songs discovered that month.
So, like any nerd would do, I built a Spotify app to help automate the lazy parts. I wanted to share my new music discoveries as well as see what others have discovered.
It's been so fun creating and curating these playlists. Since I wanted to discover more music on Spotify, I wanted others to curate their own playlists as well.
Spotify could not care less
Spotify has made it much harder to build applications on their platform by reducing developers ability to distribute apps built for their platform. And it seems like they don't care.
It seems they now are treating developers like a nuisance instead of an integral part of their community. Spotify's priorities seem to be money, control, then the community. The artists, users, and developers come after the money.
On February 6 of this year (2026), Spotify announced that the following changes to their 'Developer Access' program:
Reducing the number of users allowed in 'Development Mode' from 25 to 5.
Developers are required to be on any paid plan to access the Spotify Web API.
API access to various endpoints have been removed.
Developers can only have one app per account in 'Development Mode'.
To move out of developer mode, developers must prove a monthly minimum of 250k active users. Introduced April 15, 2025
All of these policy changes seem, from the outside, to help protect Spotify's revenue stream, it's moat, and not the artists, nor the developers, nor Spotify's own marketing team.
Let's address them from the aspect of the Spotify developer.
Reducing the number of users allowed in 'Development Mode'
On it's own, I give this one a pass.
However, I feel like this will result in less testing and less feedback from users on Spotify apps. This could result in an increase of poor application experiences within Spotify's ecosystem.
Dropping test users by 80%, from 25 to 5 users, seems unnecessary. This alongside the other changes makes getting distribution more difficult.
Developers are required to be on any paid plan
Making this a requirement for development mode apps seems ridiculous.
I understand that Spotify wants to make sure that developers are serious about their apps because 'they can afford it' but this seems as useful as a speeding ticket.
There are many developers who are just starting out and may not have the funds to pay for a paid plan but they have a love for music and are curious. To that, this is stifling. It results in a smaller and less diverse developer community.
This will simply result in fewer and less creative apps in the Spotify ecosystem as well as less adoption of the apps currently on the Spotify developer platform.
A small but better improvement should make this a requirement only when the app is ready to go live. Bot accounts could not create apps.
Alternatively, restrict various live API endpoints to paid plans. This would allow developers to build and test their apps without having to pay for a paid plan until they are ready to go live.
API access to various endpoints have been removed
Spotify removed a majority of the endpoints that could be used to scrape data from Spotify, so I can understand why Spotify would want to remove these endpoints.
This affects only new applications on the platform as Spotify rolled back their decision to remove the endpoints for existing apps that rely on these endpoints.
Speaking up can work.
Developers can only have one app per account
This is aggregeous and unfair to the developers as well as Spotify's own platform. It simply does not make sense.
Since there is now a one-app limit that anyone (cough on a paid plan cough) can create and the minimum of...