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

Music and Me

fakemink

1

MIRINAE

TAK, Zekk

2

Rain Capsule

Namitape

3

Overfeel

Namitape

4

All At Once

Ninajirachi

5

Infohazard

Ninajirachi

6

Delete

Ninajirachi

7

I Was Meant To Die Like This

kuru

8

weathergirl

FLAVOR FOLEY

9

Lawsyn

ayowitty

10

THUNDRRR

Quadeca

11

THAT'S WHY

Quadeca

12

WAGING WAR

Quadeca, Olēka

13

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Quadeca

14

Always Have Always Will

Jane Remover

15

SLAM PUNK

Che

16

Akibare

Mylta

17

My life is mine alone! (feat. nenne)

Mylta, nenne

18

disarmed

kumosai, Sayako

19

spectrum

icesawder

20

NOWNEVER

Jaron

21

How to Pretend

Lucy Bedroque

22

Knot Me

Lucy Bedroque

23

Sweet Pitcher

Lucy Bedroque

24

Thousand yard stare

kmoe

25

angels in camo

Jane Remover

26

Professional Vengeance

Jane Remover

27

Dreamflasher

Jane Remover

28

Experimental Skin

Jane Remover

29

Psychoboost feat danny brown

Jane Remover, Danny Brown

30

Dancing with your eyes closed

Jane Remover

31

Spider

venturing

32

Believe

venturing

33

alucarda lives!

smiling broadly

34

fake blood recipe

smiling broadly

35

flower bed

defsharp

36

sheaskedwhatmylifeislike

ericdoa

37

Caught up (in circles)

Syzy

38

Pastel Express

Cynax

39

St. Chroma (feat. Daniel Caesar)

Tyler, The Creator, Daniel Caesar

40

let's go home

Jane Remover

41

can you tell?

Jane Remover

42

champ

Jane Remover

43

pretender

Jane Remover

44

kodak moment

Jane Remover

45

movies for guys

Jane Remover

46

misplace

Jane Remover

47

Catch me if you can

tn-shi

48

natural

zeroth

49

mint

Snail's House

50

Emerald Lakeside - Action

はがね, Kitsui Akira

51

back off!!!

Jane Remover, kmoe, juno

52

one more life

Murphmusic, park.

53

Clinozoisite

Ludicin

54

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

underscores

55

Rabbit In The Black Room

Rabbit House

56

String Theocracy - Key Ingredient ver.

Mili

57

My guy (Corporate shuffle)

underscores

58

Wizards

xaev, mopearound

59

Everything Goes On

Porter Robinson, League of Legends

60

phobie d’impulsion

glaive

61

PUSH UR T3MPRR

femtanyl

62

Amethyst Aurora

BilliumMoto

63

the now now and never

what is your name?

64

Reverse Nightmare Tower

bye2

65

pop music

Limonène

66

EXACTLY WHY I'M STILL HERE - TURQUOISEDEATH Remix

bunnyprodge, TURQUOISEDEATH

67

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

glaive

68

Tojita Sekai

Camellia

69

commatose

glass beach

70

200

glass beach

71

until the dawn breaks

Deathbrain

72

dumb party

Internet Girl

73

skinz

8485

74

Algas Danses

seatrus

75

うみのゆき

seatrus

76

Palmy Flakes

seatrus

77

Cloud99 (As Above Mix)

Machine Girl

78

enchanted love

linear ring

79

Midnight Theater

Kano, Nagi Nemoto

80

Mola mola

Marmalade butcher

81

Another Ride

ippo.tsk, Synthesizer V ANRI

82

neon glow

glass beach

83

I Still Miss You

bo en, Tomggg

84

(We Are) Friends

bo en, Winamp Boys

85

Our Time

bo en, PAS TASTA

86

Kansoku-eisei

Nanahira, Camellia

87

GURUGURU

Snail's House

88

About 10 Hours of Doubting Myself

Yem

89

GHOST OF LORELEY

lasah

90

awesome ends with ME and ugly starts with U

c0ncernn

91

DILF repellent

c0ncernn

92

タイニーリトル・アジアンタム

ShibayanRecords

93

lastnaut

Sleeping Pola

94

NekovhParavh

Sad Keyboard Guy, Gardens

95

cool delusions about morphing into a cat

crxw

96

Blooming Afternoon

ミツキヨ

97

you're Nxt -Dreams Remix- (feat. MisoilePunch)

uma, Morimori Atsushi, MisoilePunch♪

98

Tenebre Rosso Sangue (ULTRAKILL Original Game Soundtrack)

Keygen Church

99

Altars of Apostasy

Heaven Pierce Her

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