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Sunset of libspotify on May 16, 2022

Posted April 12, 2022

Josh Brown

In 2015, we announced that we were discontinuing libspotify, a C library that developers once used to interact with Spotify and to stream audio. If you still have software that relies on libspotify then you should take steps now to adapt your application, close it down, or to replace libspotify with a supported developer product. We will be disabling access to libspotify on May 16, 2022. After that date, integrations that still use libspotify will stop working.

What are the alternatives to libspotify?

There are a variety of newer public APIs and SDKs that you can consider switching to, depending on how your application uses libspotify. These newer APIs support some but not all of the use cases that libspotify once did.

If your app uses libspotify to stream audio on a computer then you should upgrade to the Web Playback SDK. The Web Playback SDK enables developers to stream music and podcasts to Spotify Premium users on the web through a JavaScript API. You can combine the Web Playback SDK with our Player API to help with observing the currently playing track and managing playback.

Device makers who are interested in integrating Spotify with a commercially available speaker can learn more about integrating Spotify Connect here.

If your app uses libspotify to read information about music or podcasts then you should consider implementing the Tracks API, the Episode API, or other metadata endpoints as an alternative to libspotify.

Where can I find help?

Drop by the Spotify for Developers community forum if you have any questions about the end of libspotify or about alternatives that might make sense for your app.