Hi piracy community,

I’m currently thinking about developing a tool which allows downloading songs from Spotify. Now, I don’t think this is allowed in Spotifys ToS and I wanted to ask, if anybody has any experience with getting their Spotify account banned.

I have 3 main questions:

  1. Can I appeal my ban?
  2. What happens if the account is part of a family? Does the family owner get punished?
  3. Does the payment method get locked?

Any and all help would be appreciated!

Note: I know that tools for this already exist, but I want to write my own.

  • Willowtree2222@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    I would get a premium trial and share any playlists on the account you don’t want to lose for the development of your tool. Worked for me when exporting my 4000~ song playlist.

  • ThetaDev@lemm.eeEnglish
    121·
    9 months ago

    Spotify does not have the power to lock your credit card or paypal account. Account bans might happen and I have seen E-Mail screenshots of people who got banned. I am not sure if they would take down an entire set of family accounts.

    If you care about the content of your Spotify account (playlists, listening history) you should not use it for piracy. Just create a new one. If you are fine with 160kbps OGG files, you dont even need a paid account.

    Do not create Spotify accounts with trash mail addresses, they may work at first and get banned the next day (happened to me after I created some accounts for scraping their API).

    You can also export all your Spotify data as a precaution (GDPR export from the account page, they send you an email with a link to a zip file after a couple of days).

    • sometoruser@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Spotify does not have the power to lock your credit card or paypal account.

      That’s not what I meant. Sorry, I might’ve not been clear there. I was asking, if they would block the creation of new accounts with the same payment method(e.g. same PayPal account).

      I am not sure if they would take down an entire set of family accounts.

      Yeah, this what I worry about. I thought about if I can just add burners to my family account, but I am not sure if they would ban my main or the entire family.

      If you are fine with 160kbps OGG files, you dont even need a paid account.

      A good idea, if you want the higher quality, would probably be to use gift cards, which you can buy at the store. I don’t think that you can trace these back to a real name and the most I could loose would be 10 Bucks or smth.

      Do not create Spotify accounts with trash mail addresses, they may work at first and get banned the next day

      Thanks for the tip! I will keep that in mind.

      You can also export all your Spotify data as a precaution

      This is probably also a very good Idea. Even if I don’t go through with it. It is always a good Idea to have a copy of your data.

  • B0rax@feddit.deEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    Try to make it work with a free account (zotify for example works with a free account no problem).

    Then you don’t have to worry about that.

    In the other side, there have been zero reports of people getting banned when using zotify.

  • communismEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    I have heard from friends that they got banned for using adblockers on free Spotify. I used a tool, forgot what it’s called, for the brief time I had Spotify Premium where you could give it access to your account via the API and it’d search music piracy websites to download all the songs and albums in your library. After I had downloaded my library I cancelled my subscription. So that was entirely within Spotify’s ToS. (Music piracy is still illegal, but the violation didn’t happen against Spotify.) I suppose if you wanted to do this then doing something like that, where you just look the song up on music piracy sites and don’t actually download from Spotify directly, would be less likely to get your account banned. You still need Premium to access the API, but you could just scrape the webpage if you want.

    • punkisundead [they/them]@slrpnk.netEnglish
      41·
      9 months ago

      I have heard from friends that they got banned for using adblockers on free Spotify.

      My account got deactivated after doing that (firefox+ublock). It was really sneaky because my password just stopped working. My account was reactivated by contacting the support and they never told me the reason why my account got deactivated.