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

God (with current joys & never goodbye)

matt proxy, Current Joys, never goodbye

1

STARS

matt proxy

2

Burn It

ok, fakemink

3

Trajectory

lapix, Mylta, RANASOL

4

fish in the pool

yeule

5

E7len's Knife

icesawder

6

Music Baby (leroy Remix)

Jane Remover

7

Dyad

Jamie Paige, unit.0

8

Machine Love

Jamie Paige

9

Flashout Freestyle

slayr

10

My Darling, My Companion

Jamie Paige

11

NOGWAPNOLIFE

bleood

12

BIRDBRAIN

Jamie Paige, OK Glass

13

In the dark

venturing

14

Set In Stone

slayr

15

Love Blur

slayr

16

Music Baby

Jane Remover

17

media offline

ariiol

18

SISTERHOOD (LOVE, HER.)

Lucy Bedroque

19

The End

Danny Brown, ta Ukrainka, Zheani, Cynthoni

20

Music and Me

fakemink

21

MIRINAE

TAK, Zekk

22

Rain Capsule

Namitape

23

Overfeel

Namitape

24

All At Once

Ninajirachi

25

Infohazard

Ninajirachi

26

Delete

Ninajirachi

27

weathergirl

FLAVOR FOLEY

28

Lawsyn

ayowitty

29

THUNDRRR

Quadeca

30

THAT'S WHY

Quadeca

31

WAGING WAR

Quadeca, Olēka

32

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Quadeca

33

Always Have Always Will

Jane Remover

34

SLAM PUNK

Che

35

Akibare

Mylta

36

My life is mine alone! (feat. nenne)

Mylta, nenne

37

disarmed

kumosai, Sayako

38

spectrum

icesawder

39

NOWNEVER

Jaron Steele

40

Pretty Peach

Lucy Bedroque

41

How to Pretend

Lucy Bedroque

42

Knot Me

Lucy Bedroque

43

Sweet Pitcher

Lucy Bedroque

44

Thousand yard stare

kmoe

45

angels in camo

Jane Remover

46

Professional Vengeance

Jane Remover

47

Dreamflasher

Jane Remover

48

Experimental Skin

Jane Remover

49

Psychoboost

Jane Remover, Danny Brown

50

Dancing with your eyes closed

Jane Remover

51

Spider

venturing

52

Believe

venturing

53

alucarda lives!

smiling broadly

54

fake blood recipe

smiling broadly

55

flower bed

defsharp

56

sheaskedwhatmylifeislike

ericdoa

57

Caught up (in circles)

Syzy

58

Pastel Express

Cynax

59

St. Chroma (feat. Daniel Caesar)

Tyler, The Creator, Daniel Caesar

60

let's go home

Jane Remover

61

can you tell?

Jane Remover

62

champ

Jane Remover

63

pretender

Jane Remover

64

kodak moment

Jane Remover

65

movies for guys

Jane Remover

66

misplace

Jane Remover

67

Catch me if you can

tn-shi

68

natural

zeroth

69

mint

Snail's House

70

Emerald Lakeside - Action

はがね, Kitsui Akira

71

back off!!!

Jane Remover, kmoe, juno

72

one more life

Murphmusic, park.

73

Clinozoisite

Ludicin

74

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

underscores

75

Rabbit In The Black Room

Rabbit House

76

String Theocracy - Key Ingredient ver.

Mili

77

My guy (Corporate shuffle)

underscores

78

Wizards

xaev, mopearound

79

Everything Goes On

Porter Robinson, League of Legends

80

phobie d’impulsion

glaive

81

PUSH UR T3MPRR

femtanyl

82

Amethyst Aurora

BilliumMoto

83

the now now and never

what is your name?

84

Reverse Nightmare Tower

bye2

85

pop music

Limonène

86

EXACTLY WHY I'M STILL HERE - TURQUOISEDEATH Remix

bunnyprodge, TURQUOISEDEATH

87

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

glaive

88

Tojita Sekai

Camellia

89

commatose

glass beach

90

200

glass beach

91

until the dawn breaks

Deathbrain

92

dumb party

Internet Girl

93

skinz

8485

94

Algas Danses

seatrus

95

うみのゆき

seatrus

96

Palmy Flakes

seatrus

97

Cloud99 (As Above Mix)

Machine Girl

98

enchanted love

linear ring

99

Midnight Theater

Kano, Nagi Nemoto

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