Scraping the Spotify API
If you’re a musician, promoter or anyone else in the music industry, you may have some creative ideas for building your own music apps, dashboards, or promotional campaigns using data from Spotify. The good news is that it’s incredibly easy to extract data from Spotify’s public catalog, allowing you to download data on Spotify tracks, artists, playlists & much more!
We’ll show you how to scrape public Spotify library data using the official Spotify Data API, which works with your personal Spotify account (a free one is fine). Once you have access to the API, you can collect data using your own custom Spotify scraper or through our freemium no-code service hosted here!
Analyzing Your Spotify Data
Before we jump into scraping data from Spotify’s API, you may want to check out some of the free tools and websites available to analyze your own Spotify data or access other Spotify dataset CSVs.
- Stats for Spotify - View your own top charts and see how your listening history & habits change using your own historical Spotify data.
- Spotify Charts - Spotify data straight from the source! See what’s currently ranking on the top charts.
- Spotify Pie - See a visualization of stats from your own Spotify data.
- Spotistats - Get unique insights on your listening habits & streaming history.
- Soundcharts Spotify Analytics - Stats, analytics & data for Spotify artists.
While these tools can give you a good idea of what’s possible when using Spotify data, you’ll have much more control over your data analysis when you can download the raw data yourself from the Spotify API. So we suggest browsing around to get some ideas if you’re more interested in creating a data science or exploratory project before you reinvent the wheel.
Owning your own raw Spotify music data can be a good idea as well, as handing over your personal Spotify data to these music services may be a little risky and you will lose access to your own data if and when these apps eventually close down. When you get Spotify data from the API, you can save these Excel & CSV files to your own cloud and personal storage devices so you retain the data forever.
Scraping the Spotify API
Since web scraping Spotify data can be tricky, it’s best to use Spotify’s Official API. Furthermore, unregulated Spotify web scraping may violate Spotify’s terms and get your account and/or IP address banned!
To get started with scraping Spotify the right way, head to the Official Spotify Developers Platform and log in. You can use your existing Spotify username and password, or if you really want you can create a new Spotify account just for scraping.
Once you’re signed in, you’ll want to head to the Spotify Web API, which offers a number of API endpoints you can use for collecting Spotify data with.
Your Spotify Account Client Secret & Token
Before you can use the Spotify Web API, you’ll need an access token to make requests to the API with. For this, you need to head to the Spotify Developer Dashboard where you can create a project and manage authentication using your client ID and secret.
We’ve prepared a full step-by-step tutorial explaining How to Get Your Spotify Client ID, Secret & API Token you can follow to generate your access token. Make sure you get this token first before reading onward below.
Spotify Data Download
We’ll walk through a few of the most popular data scraping examples we see our users perform. The following will show you how to use our freemium service to get started, but you can also code your own Spotify scraper using the exact same steps outlined below if you’d prefer.
Spotify Playlist Data
One popular scraping use case is to collect all of the tracks within a Spotify playlist. You can get started using the Spotify Playlist Tracks Scraper which requires a Spotify Playlist ID and will pull the data from the Spotify Get Playlists Tracks Endpoint. See How to Export Spotify Playlists to Excel for a detailed walkthrough.
You’ll be able to scrape the individual tracks for any public playlist or playlist that you have access to in the Spotify account linked to your Spotify developer account.
1. Get the Spotify Playlist ID
You can get this Playlist ID from any playlist on Spotify (e.g. Spotify Wrapped) - simply click the three dots in the header in the Spotify app and find the “Copy to playlist” option:
You can then paste the playlist link into any text editor of your choice and it will look like this: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWUq3wF0JVtEy?si=9aa8544f042245f4, where the Playlist ID is the part after the last / but before the ? or in this case: 37i9dQZF1DWUq3wF0JVtEy
2. Paste in Playlist ID
Next, following the Spotify Playlist Tracks Scraper, you simply paste in the Playlist ID as well as your API Token into our API endpoint wrapper. You can of course use your own code to do this, just check out the “Preview” section in our web application for the exact HTTP request you’ll need to make.
Hit execute and we’ll query the Spotify API endpoint on your behalf using your API token to download the playlist tracks.
3. Download Spotify Playlist Tracks
The Spotify API returns this data in JSON format, but our service automatically converts the response to downloadable CSV files you can start using right away! The first response will show you the first 50 tracks in the playlist, but you can see the pagination instructions for getting the next 50 and so on.
If you have a large playlist to scrape (with hundreds or thousands of tracks) or a long list of playlist IDs, you can use our Spotify Playlist Tracks - Multiple Playlists Workflow to automatically export playlists to Excel CSV, combining all playlist tracks into a single CSV file.
Track Audio Features
If you want to perform a more in-depth analysis of the actual audio features for any Spotify track, you can do this using the Spotify API, which will return some metadata about the musical properties. This can be useful for finding songs to mix together with similar beats per minute metrics.
You’ll want to query the Spotify Track Features Endpoint with a given Track ID (you can get these from the playlist example above, or through the search feature below). See our Spotify Track Audio API endpoint wrapper to collect this data using our service.
Artists & Search Results
Another common use case for Spotify data is finding popular or up & coming artists in specific niches. Scraping Spotify artist & track results for keywords, genres, etc… is a great way to find this information - you can see the Spotify Search Results Endpoint for more information from their API.
We have a wrapper around this endpoint as well, so you can scrape this data without writing code. See our Spotify Artist Scraper for finding artists or our Spotify Track Scraper to collect tracks directly from Spotify’s search results.
Please note that the Spotify API will not return contact information for artists. However, you can usually browse to their profiles and then manually try looking them up on Instagram by name and usually find a way to reach out to them.
Track & Artist Popularity
We’re also often asked about scraping the play counts for specific tracks and artists. While it would make sense to be able to access this through API (since these counts are visible in the Spotify app), for whatever reason Spotify doesn’t make play counts available via API. They instead offer a relative “popularity” metric you can use from 1 to 100 - depending on your needs this may suffice.
Manually Scraping Play Counts
If you absolutely must scrape the Spotify play counts, we offer a scraping solution below using our HAR File Web Scraper - just see the video below for more information.
More Spotify Scraping Options
There are a lot more endpoints and options we did not cover in this brief article, so feel free to browse this webpage and try out other features of the Spotify API through our platform. You can also browse all the endpoints from the Spotify Web API to see what else is possible.
If you find an API Endpoint we did not list here, or need us to support additional parameters to an existing endpoint, simply reach out to our support chat widget on our website and we’ll be happy to add additional support!