> I wonder what the aversion to having an API is. I get that it might not be making any real money, so removing any APIs would be a cost saving.
Three aspects: ad blocking, fraud prevention and DRM. Of course all platforms have their internal APIs but if they were to become too public you'd instantly see "artists" artificially bumping up their listener ratios for higher payouts, you'd see people developing third party clients (or patches to first party clients) to evade advertising, and you'd see people just blatantly ripping the catalogue.
Of course all of these things happen at the moment already, but the scope is limited for now. Security by obfuscation is not true security, but at least a (massive) impedance.
If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue. As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter, If I pay $20 per month and play Taylor Swift 24/7 she'd get 100% of the money, minus the 10-20% to run the service, so that's attempting to pump up your own numbers would cause be a money losing exercise.
> If you pay for the service, there should be no ads, so that's not an issue.
IIRC, at least Netflix and Spotify have a "pay less, but get some ads" tiers, and YouTube doesn't want SponsorBlock et al to impact the golden geese too much.
> As for artists trying to push their own listing ratio, why would that matter
People have scammed streaming services for millions of dollars [1]. Sure, at their scale it's peanuts, but still eyewatering sums of money for normal people.
Three aspects: ad blocking, fraud prevention and DRM. Of course all platforms have their internal APIs but if they were to become too public you'd instantly see "artists" artificially bumping up their listener ratios for higher payouts, you'd see people developing third party clients (or patches to first party clients) to evade advertising, and you'd see people just blatantly ripping the catalogue.
Of course all of these things happen at the moment already, but the scope is limited for now. Security by obfuscation is not true security, but at least a (massive) impedance.