More and more users are using Bopster. With over 3000 monthly visitors, 1500 saved playlists and 500 registered users, more and more feedback comes in. In this background series I will try to explain why Bopster makes certain decisions.
On today's topic: Why doesn't Bopster offer any more streaming service integration?
Currently we offer the following integration:
- Playlist Import: Spotify & YouTube
- Songs: Spotify & YouTube
- Bopster Live playback: YouTube (main), Spotify (limited)
Spotify and YouTube are the most used platforms for music in the world by a great mile. That's why they offer public API's (read: information made public with automated URLs). It also made sense to implement these streaming services because of their popularity. However, in the last months we have seen a lot of feedback coming in to request more streaming services to be added. And we tried of course. However, with not much success until now. Below are the reasons why I was not succesful trying to implement them:
Deezer
Deezer is a pretty popular streaming service in Europe. Unfortunately, Deezer's Developer program has been discontinued and therefore Bopster is not able to connect to their API for retrieving information on playlist & song information.
Apple Music
Apple has an extensive API through MusicKit. However, this requires a $99/year fee. Because Bopster is free, I am not able to purchase this as the monthly costs are already pretty high to maintain. However, if in the future more donations will come in, I will obviously try to make this happen.
Amazon Music
I have not tried this one out yet.
Tidal
Tidal has an API, but I was not able to get it working. In the future, I might try again, maybe they have fixed the issues.
Spotify (Bopster Live playback)
As you can read in the settings of Bopster Live, Spotify has playback integration so you can use it with Bopster Live. However, as Bopster is not a registered company, I am not able to register for the full public API.
Is your favorite music streaming service not in this list above but you think I should try to implement it? Let me know through social media or via e-mail.
So this is why we are not able to support your favorite music streaming service.
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