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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

I love seeing software like this, even if it's not legal. Who cares? I remember being a teenager and trying out all sorts of cool underground, fundamentally illegal software, or stuff that worked around Terms of Service.

Where would the world be today without Napster? Maybe the same place, but provocative software is the definition of cool.

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Nothing illegal about it, Spotify has a well documented API and supports third party clients

So does this version not have advertisements or something?

You still need to log into spotify to use any 3rd party app and none of the playback apis will work without a premium account. Apps like this one are for people with premium accounts.

Eh. Ish. They only support playback within a browser and have deprecated native playback support years ago. Also their ToS technically doesn't let you do a looot of things you may want. Like caching. Srsly, you're not allowed to cache things. Many 3rd parties stopped supporting spotify because the dev ToS kept getting worse.

Regardless, I'm excited about this little project even if it goes against the ToS.

Hmm it was years ago but I remember now my chatbot was controlling the playback session in a browser, you’re right.

Things like Napster have a long tradition dating back to the 1960s, in the UK the response to the paternalistic and stuffy state monopoly on music broadcasting was for people to put studios and transmitters on ships parked just outside of British territorial waters. That’s really what fuelled the explosion in British music!

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