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

Love Blur

slayr

1

Music Baby

Jane Remover

2

Typing

ariiol

3

media offline

ariiol

4

The End

Danny Brown, ta Ukrainka, Zheani, Cynthoni

5

Music and Me

fakemink

6

MIRINAE

TAK, Zekk

7

Rain Capsule

Namitape

8

Overfeel

Namitape

9

All At Once

Ninajirachi

10

Infohazard

Ninajirachi

11

Delete

Ninajirachi

12

weathergirl

FLAVOR FOLEY

13

Lawsyn

ayowitty

14

THUNDRRR

Quadeca

15

THAT'S WHY

Quadeca

16

WAGING WAR

Quadeca, Olēka

17

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Quadeca

18

Always Have Always Will

Jane Remover

19

SLAM PUNK

Che

20

Akibare

Mylta

21

My life is mine alone! (feat. nenne)

Mylta, nenne

22

disarmed

kumosai, Sayako

23

spectrum

icesawder

24

NOWNEVER

Jaron

25

Pretty Peach

Lucy Bedroque

26

How to Pretend

Lucy Bedroque

27

Knot Me

Lucy Bedroque

28

Sweet Pitcher

Lucy Bedroque

29

Thousand yard stare

kmoe

30

angels in camo

Jane Remover

31

Professional Vengeance

Jane Remover

32

Dreamflasher

Jane Remover

33

Experimental Skin

Jane Remover

34

Psychoboost

Jane Remover, Danny Brown

35

Dancing with your eyes closed

Jane Remover

36

Spider

venturing

37

Believe

venturing

38

alucarda lives!

smiling broadly

39

fake blood recipe

smiling broadly

40

flower bed

defsharp

41

sheaskedwhatmylifeislike

ericdoa

42

Caught up (in circles)

Syzy

43

Pastel Express

Cynax

44

St. Chroma (feat. Daniel Caesar)

Tyler, The Creator, Daniel Caesar

45

let's go home

Jane Remover

46

can you tell?

Jane Remover

47

champ

Jane Remover

48

pretender

Jane Remover

49

kodak moment

Jane Remover

50

movies for guys

Jane Remover

51

misplace

Jane Remover

52

Catch me if you can

tn-shi

53

natural

zeroth

54

mint

Snail's House

55

Emerald Lakeside - Action

はがね, Kitsui Akira

56

back off!!!

Jane Remover, kmoe, juno

57

one more life

Murphmusic, park.

58

Clinozoisite

Ludicin

59

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

underscores

60

Rabbit In The Black Room

Rabbit House

61

String Theocracy - Key Ingredient ver.

Mili

62

My guy (Corporate shuffle)

underscores

63

Wizards

xaev, mopearound

64

Everything Goes On

Porter Robinson, League of Legends

65

phobie d’impulsion

glaive

66

PUSH UR T3MPRR

femtanyl

67

Amethyst Aurora

BilliumMoto

68

the now now and never

what is your name?

69

Reverse Nightmare Tower

bye2

70

pop music

Limonène

71

EXACTLY WHY I'M STILL HERE - TURQUOISEDEATH Remix

bunnyprodge, TURQUOISEDEATH

72

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

glaive

73

Tojita Sekai

Camellia

74

commatose

glass beach

75

200

glass beach

76

until the dawn breaks

Deathbrain

77

dumb party

Internet Girl

78

skinz

8485

79

Algas Danses

seatrus

80

うみのゆき

seatrus

81

Palmy Flakes

seatrus

82

Cloud99 (As Above Mix)

Machine Girl

83

enchanted love

linear ring

84

Midnight Theater

Kano, Nagi Nemoto

85

Mola mola

Marmalade butcher

86

Another Ride

ippo.tsk, Synthesizer V ANRI

87

neon glow

glass beach

88

I Still Miss You

bo en, Tomggg

89

(We Are) Friends

bo en, Winamp Boys

90

Our Time

bo en, PAS TASTA

91

Kansoku-eisei

Nanahira, Camellia

92

GURUGURU

Snail's House

93

About 10 Hours of Doubting Myself

Yem

94

GHOST OF LORELEY

lasah

95

awesome ends with ME and ugly starts with U

c0ncernn

96

DILF repellent

c0ncernn

97

タイニーリトル・アジアンタム

ShibayanRecords

98

lastnaut

Sleeping Pola

99

NekovhParavh

Sad Keyboard Guy, Gardens

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