the daps api
The same API our own apps run on.
A complete, honest catalog. A knowledge graph of samples, credits, and the session players who actually made the music. And an interface with no private door for the house, which is easy to say and only meaningful if there genuinely is not one. None of it is live yet: daps is pre-launch, and the specification publishes before the platform does.
No privileged interface.
Everything a daps app does, it does through the public API. What differs is authorization and rate limits, never the interface itself.
Nobody bills for access.
No commercial tier, no negotiated exception, and no price list daps could introduce later, because an exception is how this quietly turns into a licensing business.
A breaking change ships as a version.
The previous version stays supported for a window published in advance, and only a security or legal necessity can shorten it.
the boundary
The interface is the whole surface.
A platform that keeps a private interface for itself will eventually use it. daps does not have one, and the constraint is written down where anybody can hold it to account.
An app acting for one listener cannot see another listener’s history, so neither can the API. That is not a policy daps could change its mind about later. The API cannot answer the question.
Pages published on daps carry a different promise from the API’s. They are versioned and backward compatible: a page somebody else adopted keeps working, and at worst a piece of content pulled for a rights or terms violation is replaced by a fallback, so the page still stands.
licensing, stated precisely
Two licenses, and daps says which is which.
Plenty of companies describe themselves as open and leave the detail vague. Here it is.
apache 2.0
The specification and the schemas.
Fully open source. Read them, implement them, fork them, or serve them yourself. The schemas describing daps data are open on the same terms.
elastic license 2.0
The platform itself.
Source-available: readable, forkable for development, auditable by anyone, and usable for anything except offering the software to others as a hosted or managed service. A few narrow pieces stay closed: payment and royalty computation, licensed-content enforcement, and fraud detection.
your infrastructure
Nothing runs inside daps.
daps ships no client runtime and hosts no third-party code. What is open here is the interface and the data. Your code runs on your machines, and daps is not pretending it will run anywhere else.
conditions of access
Who you are is not the question.
A label, a newsroom, a university, a working developer, or a fan may all build against daps. What is bounded is making money out of the use itself, because what the API serves came from artists and from a community, not from daps.
the terms, in short
- Touch only the data your project strictly needs, and only what a person explicitly authorized.
- Serve human artistry and fandom. No engagement-hacking mechanics, no advertising surfaces, no treating listeners as inventory.
- Do not charge for access to what daps serves, resell the catalog or the knowledge graph, or sell a product whose value is daps data.
- Do not insert yourself as a revenue middleman between fans and rights holders.
Linking is not API use. A permalink, a link preview, and an embeddable player are open to anyone, commercial publications included, on the same footing as everybody else.
keep me posted
The future of music is open.
daps is pre-launch and building in the open.