this all started when i wanted to display my favorite songs on my /about page, i already have a spotify playlist of them so i could just use the official embed. the problem is that the embed loads 1.96 mb of minified javascript.

…and also makes tons of strange requests back to spotify, is extremely loud (with no volume slider!), and preloads some songs. on my old site i just gave in and used the official embed, but after seeing that scraping spotify embeds was possible (thanks l-m!), i tried making my own.

here they are!

extremely good songs

open in spotify

fish in the pool

yeule

1

E7len's Knife

icesawder

2

Music Baby (leroy Remix)

Jane Remover

3

Dyad

Jamie Paige, unit.0

4

Machine Love

Jamie Paige

5

Flashout Freestyle

slayr

6

My Darling, My Companion

Jamie Paige

7

NOGWAPNOLIFE

bleood

8

BIRDBRAIN

Jamie Paige, OK Glass

9

In the dark

venturing

10

Set In Stone

slayr

11

Love Blur

slayr

12

Music Baby

Jane Remover

13

media offline

ariiol

14

The End

Danny Brown, ta Ukrainka, Zheani, Cynthoni

15

Music and Me

fakemink

16

MIRINAE

TAK, Zekk

17

Rain Capsule

Namitape

18

Overfeel

Namitape

19

All At Once

Ninajirachi

20

Infohazard

Ninajirachi

21

Delete

Ninajirachi

22

weathergirl

FLAVOR FOLEY

23

Lawsyn

ayowitty

24

THUNDRRR

Quadeca

25

THAT'S WHY

Quadeca

26

WAGING WAR

Quadeca, Olēka

27

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Quadeca

28

Always Have Always Will

Jane Remover

29

SLAM PUNK

Che

30

Akibare

Mylta

31

My life is mine alone! (feat. nenne)

Mylta, nenne

32

disarmed

kumosai, Sayako

33

spectrum

icesawder

34

NOWNEVER

Jaron Steele

35

Pretty Peach

Lucy Bedroque

36

How to Pretend

Lucy Bedroque

37

Knot Me

Lucy Bedroque

38

Sweet Pitcher

Lucy Bedroque

39

Thousand yard stare

kmoe

40

angels in camo

Jane Remover

41

Professional Vengeance

Jane Remover

42

Dreamflasher

Jane Remover

43

Experimental Skin

Jane Remover

44

Psychoboost

Jane Remover, Danny Brown

45

Dancing with your eyes closed

Jane Remover

46

Spider

venturing

47

Believe

venturing

48

alucarda lives!

smiling broadly

49

fake blood recipe

smiling broadly

50

flower bed

defsharp

51

sheaskedwhatmylifeislike

ericdoa

52

Caught up (in circles)

Syzy

53

Pastel Express

Cynax

54

St. Chroma (feat. Daniel Caesar)

Tyler, The Creator, Daniel Caesar

55

let's go home

Jane Remover

56

can you tell?

Jane Remover

57

champ

Jane Remover

58

pretender

Jane Remover

59

kodak moment

Jane Remover

60

movies for guys

Jane Remover

61

misplace

Jane Remover

62

Catch me if you can

tn-shi

63

natural

zeroth

64

mint

Snail's House

65

Emerald Lakeside - Action

はがね, Kitsui Akira

66

back off!!!

Jane Remover, kmoe, juno

67

one more life

Murphmusic, park.

68

Clinozoisite

Ludicin

69

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

underscores

70

Rabbit In The Black Room

Rabbit House

71

String Theocracy - Key Ingredient ver.

Mili

72

My guy (Corporate shuffle)

underscores

73

Wizards

xaev, mopearound

74

Everything Goes On

Porter Robinson, League of Legends

75

phobie d’impulsion

glaive

76

PUSH UR T3MPRR

femtanyl

77

Amethyst Aurora

BilliumMoto

78

the now now and never

what is your name?

79

Reverse Nightmare Tower

bye2

80

pop music

Limonène

81

EXACTLY WHY I'M STILL HERE - TURQUOISEDEATH Remix

bunnyprodge, TURQUOISEDEATH

82

even when the sun is dead, will you tell them how hard i tried

glaive

83

Tojita Sekai

Camellia

84

commatose

glass beach

85

200

glass beach

86

until the dawn breaks

Deathbrain

87

dumb party

Internet Girl

88

skinz

8485

89

Algas Danses

seatrus

90

うみのゆき

seatrus

91

Palmy Flakes

seatrus

92

Cloud99 (As Above Mix)

Machine Girl

93

enchanted love

linear ring

94

Midnight Theater

Kano, Nagi Nemoto

95

Mola mola

Marmalade butcher

96

Another Ride

ippo.tsk, Synthesizer V ANRI

97

neon glow

glass beach

98

I Still Miss You

bo en, Tomggg

99

(We Are) Friends

bo en, Winamp Boys

100

there's more songs on spotify :)

the now now and never

what is your name?

open in spotify

the track embed was made with 0 JS, and the playlist embed was made with 1.84kb (minified) of JS, that’s 99.9061% smaller than the official embed, and i think it fits my site much better :)

how

first, you can just make a fetch request to the normal embed url (either for a song or playlist) pretending to be a browser

const res = await fetch(
	`https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/2m2lebj9Lg6Riwfyv7G9AD`,
	{
		headers: {
			"User-Agent":
				"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:124.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/124.0",
			Accept: "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8",
			"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.5",
			"Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1",
			"Sec-Fetch-Dest": "iframe",
			"Sec-Fetch-Mode": "navigate",
			"Sec-Fetch-Site": "cross-site",
			Pragma: "no-cache",
			"Cache-Control": "no-cache",
		},
		method: "GET",
	},
);

const html = await res.text();

and in the html response you get back, at the end there’s a magical script tag with the id __NEXT_DATA__ that contains everything you need!

const json = html.substring(
	html.lastIndexOf(`type="application/json">`) +
		`type="application/json">`.length,
	html.lastIndexOf(`</script>`),
);

const data: PlaylistEmbedData = JSON.parse(json);

you can make whatever with this data now! i’d highly recommend caching it. you can cache song embed data much more aggressively than playlists cause those shouldn’t change.

it’s possible to make your embeds use 0 JS by using the native <audio /> element, which is what i do for singular song embeds. there’s a pretty big problem when using <audio /> for each song in a playlist embed though, it might take safari 8 seconds to load your site sometimes (not an exaggeration).

note that you can barely style <audio /> elements and the element looks very different across each browser. because of all that i used a bit of JS with web components for my playlist embed, which gets server side rendered with astro.

source code for scraper, components, and typescript types