Spotify has come a long way since it openly appealed to music pirates in its early days. This week, the streaming giant targeted "SpotifyDL," a browser extension enabling users to download tracks, playlists and albums, by bypassing its protections. Following a DMCA notice filed with GitHub, Spotify successfully forced the developer to strip the tool's core functionality.

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spotify logoSpotify has certainly come a long way since it allowed us to hand out free invite codes to its beta launch 16 years ago.

With over 600 million monthly active users, across over 180 markets, it is now the world’s most popular music streaming service by a significant margin.

The streaming giant has always positioned itself as a competitor to pirate services, but its success also relied on pirates. In the early days, Spotify allegedly used MP3s from The Pirate Bay to populate its beta service. The notorious Swedish torrent site was instrumental in other ways too.

“If Pirate Bay had not existed or made such a mess in the market, I don’t think Spotify would have seen the light of day. You wouldn’t get the licenses you wanted,” former Sony BMG CEO Per Sundin said a few years ago.

Pirates are Adversaries Now

Today, Spotify is the largest Swedish company according to some metrics, with a market cap of more than $120 billion. The days when it flirted with pirates are long gone and the company is actively shutting down sites and services that bypass its technical restrictions.

The music service doesn’t go after general pirate sites, but focuses on services and tools that target its own product. This includes sellers of premium codes, as well as tools that allow Spotify users to download tracks into their own devices.

These are not typical pirates, as they rely on Spotify’s legal service to function. However, the streaming service clearly isn’t happy with these creative uses of its platform, and regularly sends legal takedown notices in response.

Spotify Dismantles Download Browser Extension

This week, Spotify targeted a Chrome extension that allowed users to download decrypted tracks in high-quality audio formats, including the associated metadata. Fittingly named “SpotifyDL“, it has been available though GitHub for a few months.

The extension bypassed Spotify’s “PlayPlay” DRM to tackle Spotify’s encryption. It seemed to work as intended, allowing users to download tracks, playlists, or albums with relative ease.

SpotifyDL

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Spotify wasn’t happy with this and the company previously requested GitHub to remove the “un-playplay” code that was used to bypass its decryption. However, the SpotifyDL extension remained functional, until it too was targeted.

The takedown notice doesn’t go into much detail; it simply mentions that the entire repository is infringing and should therefore be removed.

The takedown notice

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The repository wasn’t removed in its entirety. Before taking action, GitHub allowed developer “cycyrild” to make changes so it would no longer be deemed a problem. In response, cycyrild removed the PlayPlay source code, effectively rendering the extension useless.

“Following a DMCA Takedown Notice from Spotify, I have been forced to remove the source code for the PlayPlay CDM,” the developer writes.

SpotifyDL No Longer Works

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While it is understandable that Spotify wants to protect its rights, and those of its main partners, the company’s shift in focus when it comes to ‘pirates’ is noteworthy.

Similar to Netflix and other streaming services that promised to convert pirates into paying customers, for Spotify, there’s an increasing focus on the challenge ‘pirates’ present, rather than the opportunity.