So P&S don’t stack up so well. Has anyone looked into a music playing skill based on Napster, Tidal or Deezer? Having such skills could drive those platforms’ adoption rate…
Hey mike, interesting data. I’ve seen a bit of renewed push back on Spotify in the last couple of weeks because of artist pay and looking at this it makes sense.
I also can’t believe Youtube Music is so abysmal!
There’s one or two Deezer Skills out there, and we’ve been looking at Tidal, but Napster wasn’t on my radar at all - will definitely take a look at them
@gez-mycroft - Cool that you will look into them. I did a ‘Contact Us’ for each of the three - maybe there will be some interest in the other direction too.
If Emby and Jellyfin have APIs that are supported and Tidal and Apple have APIs that are not, might an abstraction layer be written to make adding other music services easier? I don’t have enough background to write it, but it was just a thought that might be worth floating …
The challenge with so many of them is that they often have something buried in their T&C’s that preclude using it in any voice assistants - but then provide exemptions to Google and Amazon… So for community Skills this is unlikely to be an issue but for official Skills we don’t want to end up in the same place where we have with Spotify.
We’re exploring the legal questions around all this and have been talking about the various ways we can completely legitimately use services without just flying under the radar. Piggy backing off another system as you’ve suggested is one possibility.
The team are getting together face-to-face next week and we’ve got this on the agenda. So I’m hoping we’ll have some movement soon.
@MarKarm123 - tough question on why such a varied payout - maybe some services are trying to do the right thing, and others aren’t too worried about it? Not sure how negotiations come into play.
Second question is easier as I understand it - Mycroft will only be the vehicle to choose which songs to play. The relationship between the user and the streaming service (and thus the artists) will be unchanged.
One other challenge that we have to overcome is that many of these streaming services require an official agreement to use their API, especially in a product like ours. Several of them even have a special agreement for Voice Assistants as Gez mentioned. Also these services prefer to create and control their own applications.
For example if you look at Spotify, they have apps on all kinds of different products (Android, iOS, Windows, Android TV, Roku, Fire Stick/TV, etc…) and in each case Spotify is the application owner. In reality I’m sure there was some collaboration between Spotify and the hardware/platform provider to develop the application, but when you look at the developer name for any of those apps you’ll see “Spotify AB” the legal identifier for Spotify.
We have been somewhat naive in our process, we named our Pandora playing skill simply Pandora despite the fact that we haven’t developed it in collaboration with Pandora nor do they have any ownership over the application. We will be working to change that type of behavior and encouraging community developers not to name skills in a way that would imply they have been developed by another organization or in cooperation with that organization.
The absolute best course of action is to develop partnerships with music services to create official skills. I do like the idea of approaching Napster or Tidal as Mycroft’s preferred partner. Maybe we could eventually work out a business deal as well. I think Tidal is an interesting choice because they already have a deal with Plex. To me this means they are interested in servicing the more technical and enthusiast users out there.
There are a few skills out there for several music services
You can find mine here, youtube-music, soundcloud, bandcamp and deezer are the most relevant ones to this thread
MANDATORY DISCLAIMER: all this code is in alpha and not production ready, depending on when you read this you likely will run into dependency issues and need to install a few repos from source