CultureAsData-UIUC / is310-fall-2024-group-6

To be updated with a description for a collaborative semester long project
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Part 1: Selecting and Accessing Platform Data #12

Closed LucasWashor closed 1 month ago

LucasWashor commented 1 month ago

Platform: Spotify

Terms of Service/Data Access: Looking into Spotify's privacy policy there is a section titled "Your Rights" where it says that users have the ability to request access to their own personal data. You are able to download personal info such as like playlists, listening history, and account info. It is pretty clear on users downloading their personal information, just by going to your settings and submitting a request. All that happens is that Spotify has to process the request which takes about 30 days. You can get only personal info like mentioned above like your listening history.

Bulk/Academic Access:: There is a spotify API that that can provide public data like playlists and playback history, but it has rate limits and does not allow for bulk downloads. I didn't see any official academic access program for research. Accessing the Spotify API does not require any money, but you do need to register for an API key for limited access.

Research: The main tool for research is the spotify API, which can be useful for cultural analysis or focusing on music metadata like song popularity for example. For instance, There is something called spotify wrapped, that stems from spotify's API which provides a summary of your listening habbits, favorite genre, favorite artists.

Wayback: I would say that over time, the restictions have increased since spotify first launched. Spotify has introduced more restrictive terms regarding bulk data access. While users now have the right to request personal data, researchers and developers have seen increasing limits on how much data they can access through the API, especially in bulk. Something worth noting though, is that despite the increased restrictions, there is now greater transparency about how data is collected and used, which was not as clear in earlier versions of the terms of service.