beaTunes News

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Amazon PA API 5.0: The End of the Amazon Context Panel

Practically forever, beaTunes has made use of Amazon's Product Advertisement API, to display charts, product information, and similar albums. Unfortunately, Amazon has decided to "improve" the API and beginning March 9th, use of the new version 5 is mandatory. Part of the "improvement" is to get rid of most music related information like tracks belonging to an album or the duration of a track. Similar items or informative product descriptions are not available anymore, either. This makes the API much less useful for an app like beaTunes. As a result, I have decided to remove the Amazon context panel (optional, lower right panel) in beaTunes' next update, because there is no way to show meaningful information from Amazon anymore. Luckily, the Album Info panel with content sourced from WikiData and Wikipedia still works and provides high quality content without commercial interests.

For the time being, I will keep the Amazon charts in beaTunes operational. However, if Amazon further insists on significant conversion rates, it looks like its days are numbered, too.

Note, that fetching cover artwork is completely unaffected by this, as beaTunes does not use Amazon as source.

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