Quota Extension Rejected - Need advice

[adr362167]

Hi,

Our quota extension request was recently rejected and we didn't get a clear explanation and we didn't get a response from our replied email. Very confused as what we're doing is no different to several other apps we've seen implement it the exact same way. 

Hoping to get some insights from here and would appreciate any advice. Below are the 2 points we got rejected for.

1) Commercial use restrictions. Except for the limited commercial uses for Non-Streaming SDAs (set out below) commercial uses are not permitted for SDAs. Some examples of commercial uses that are not allowed include:

1. the sale, whether integrated or as a standalone product, of a Streaming SDA, the Spotify Platform, Spotify Content or Spotify Service, or sale of access to any of the foregoing;
2. any e-commerce (e.g., in-app payment or monetization) initiated via a Streaming SDA;
3. the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions on the Streaming SDA itself.

Questions

- With regards to point 1, it says that commercial use is not permitted. However we've seen lots of apps that are paid apps, and upon subscribing, user's can use the spotify integrated features to control their music. Our app has an ad supported free tier, and a paid tier that gives them more features. The Spotify integration is nested within some of the content that a paid user gets. So my question is, what exactly is considered commercial use since there are many paid apps that have the integration. Is this because of how we worded access to the feature (which we can easily fix).

- The second question for this would be point 3 with regards to the sale of advertising. Does this mean that an ad supported app is not allowed to have the spotify integration? If so, would it be an issue when the ad supported free users dont actually have access to the content where the spotify integration is in?

------

2) Synchronization: Spotify content is used in the background of visual media, such as advertising, film, TV programs, livestreams, slideshow videos (etc.)

Question

- So the spotify integration is enabled on a section of the app where we provide paid users access to video content. When spotify is enabled, it isn't the background music at all and it becomes the main track. The volume of spotify is ducked occasionally (when transitions in the video happen), but similar to above, we've seen several apps do the same and actually used that as a reference when we build this.

- So my first question is what exactly does background of media mean, when our use case is that it's the primary audio being played and there is no synchronisation at all. When a user pauses the content in our app, Spotify music remains playing and isn't synced at all.

- And my 2nd question is whether this is related to ads and whether it was a misunderstanding. There are no ads that are shown to the users who have access to the content where the Spotify integration exist.

------

I would appreciate any sort of feedback as honestly we're still unsure of what we did wrong as we followed the guidelines and also used existing app integrations as reference points of how it should be done. It doesn't help that the response from the review process was kept vague. I'm worried we have to wait 6 weeks each time to reapply without having any feedback of what exactly was wrong and we felt like our application was misunderstood if anything.

Thank you again to anyone who replies.

[tomjaimz]

If your application uses any sort of streaming of Spotify content, it's a Streaming SDA.  https://developer.spotify.com/terms covers these definitions.  If it's a Streaming SDA, you can't monetise it.

The sync rights are nothing to do with advertising, you can read up on "Synchronization rights" to understand the basic concepts here.

If you want to point to some of your reference apps, perhaps it's easier to indicate why their use cases are permitted while yours are not.

[adr362167]

Thanks for your reply.

2 examples of fitness apps that have a spotify integration where it first oAuths and connects your spotify account, and allow you to select your songs within their app are:Sweat (IOS, Android), and Ladder (IOS). Both apps are commercialised and accessible via a paid subscription. These are just 2 examples, there's several more.

So seeing that multiple commercial apps have the spotify integration, it's confusing how that is allowed unless the there are some nuances that I am missing. My assumption is that you can't monetise the "functionality" of the integration by marketing it as a "feature" of the app, but there doesn't seem to be a clear clarification of this. We can easily remove all reference to this if some wording may have given that impression. What our app does is exactly what has been implemented here where we oAuth and allow the user to select their playlist, and play/skip etc the songs within a mini control designed as per the Spotify design guidelines.

----

Regarding the next point. That is great to know that it has nothing to do with advertising. Similar to the examples before, those 2 apps don't "synchronise" their content with the spotify music. Their content could be paused while the Spotify music plays and any track can independently be played and controlled at any time. So similarly that is what we have done but unfortunately we were rejected for synchronisation which doesnt make sense since it is not background music at all.

---

I am hoping that this was a misunderstanding so we can resubmit our request but waiting 6 weeks for another rejection is quite demoralising and was hoping to get more clarification form the community here. Appreciate anyone's time who can respond to this.