Why do you offer so little Spotify links? Spotify is the most used. No one thinks about Amazon music, their collection nowhere near matches Spotify. Are you trying to force your users to purchase an Amazon music subscription? Is that it?
Ok. A better answer:
In 2012 when we redesigned AllMusic our plan was to include links to Spotify, Apple (iTunes), MOG and Rdio. These were four of the bigger players in the streaming space at the time (plus three of them used the same IDs we use) and our hope was to give streaming access to users, regardless of what service they used.
Over time, MOG and Rdio went out of business, iTunes stopped being iTunes which left only Spotify.
In order for us to know that when you click the link to "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones and you want to go to the Spotify (iTunes, Rdio, MOG) page to listen to that song, there needs to be an ID or a path underneath that button that says "Take them to https://open.spotify.com/track/7ATyLePQnHxFk5kzxWCcsh?si=431f7095b4f7430a so they can play the song."
For a while we were getting database dumps of raw track metadata from Spotify. We built an elaborate auto-linking process to say "We call this song Teenage Kicks by The Undertones. Spotify calls this song Teenage Kicks by Undertones, The. This has an 88% text match, 100% if you remove leading articles. Link our ID MT0000123456 to Spotify ID 7ATyLePQnHxFk5kzxWCcsh."
Conversely if our song is called 'Teenage Kicks by The Undertones' and their data says 'Tennaged Kix by Underwear' then it wouldn't get linked.
And then do that for the 35 million tracks in our database.
If we have a full database to compare metadata between our database and theirs, this is a *relatively* fast process (I believe our initial pass took about a week to link). However, we no longer have access to those data dumps from Spotify so we can't quickly/easily link our data set to theirs (as much as we'd like to).
They do have an API that we can try to look things up one at a time, but we've run into limits as to how hard we can hit their servers and how quickly the responses come back. We have a back-burner project to get the linking process improved but we just haven't had time to get to it.
In regards to Amazon, it is really simple. They have a search function where we can pass in https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=song: "Teenage%20Kicks" by "The%20Undertones" and a lot of the time it finds the right thing. We don't need to link anything ahead of time so we just send our request of song title + artist name into Amazon and they often can find it.
So it isn't a vindictive or manipulative effort to avoid Spotify and force people to Amazon. It's just that linking 35 million tracks one-by-one is a bigger job than we can do right now. Hopefully we can change that, plus add Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal, Apple Music, YouTube Music and more.
See answer.
This is not a real answer to me.. But thank you anyway..
