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

WHITEHORSEMANNEQUIN

Lucy Bedroque

1

keep me going (BIRDBRAIN)

slayr

2

God (with current joys & never goodbye)

matt proxy, Current Joys, never goodbye

3

STARS

matt proxy

4

Burn It

ok, fakemink

5

Trajectory

lapix, Mylta, RANASOL

6

fish in the pool

yeule

7

E7len's Knife

icesawder

8

Music Baby (leroy Remix)

Jane Remover

9

Dyad

Jamie Paige, unit.0

10

Machine Love

Jamie Paige

11

Flashout Freestyle

slayr

12

My Darling, My Companion

Jamie Paige

13

NOGWAPNOLIFE

bleood

14

BIRDBRAIN

Jamie Paige, OK Glass

15

In the dark

venturing

16

Set In Stone

slayr

17

Love Blur

slayr

18

Music Baby

Jane Remover

19

media offline

ariiol

20

SISTERHOOD (LOVE, HER.)

Lucy Bedroque

21

The End

Danny Brown, ta Ukrainka, Zheani, Cynthoni

22

Music and Me

fakemink

23

MIRINAE

TAK, Zekk

24

Rain Capsule

Namitape

25

Overfeel

Namitape

26

All At Once

Ninajirachi

27

Infohazard

Ninajirachi

28

Delete

Ninajirachi

29

weathergirl

FLAVOR FOLEY

30

Lawsyn

ayowitty

31

THUNDRRR

Quadeca

32

THAT'S WHY

Quadeca

33

WAGING WAR

Quadeca, Olēka

34

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Quadeca

35

Always Have Always Will

Jane Remover

36

SLAM PUNK

Che

37

Akibare

Mylta

38

My life is mine alone! (feat. nenne)

Mylta, nenne

39

disarmed

kumosai, Sayako

40

spectrum

icesawder

41

NOWNEVER

Jaron Steele

42

Pretty Peach

Lucy Bedroque

43

How to Pretend

Lucy Bedroque

44

Knot Me

Lucy Bedroque

45

Sweet Pitcher

Lucy Bedroque

46

Thousand yard stare

kmoe

47

angels in camo

Jane Remover

48

Professional Vengeance

Jane Remover

49

Dreamflasher

Jane Remover

50

Experimental Skin

Jane Remover

51

Psychoboost

Jane Remover, Danny Brown

52

Dancing with your eyes closed

Jane Remover

53

Spider

venturing

54

Believe

venturing

55

alucarda lives!

smiling broadly

56

fake blood recipe

smiling broadly

57

flower bed

defsharp

58

sheaskedwhatmylifeislike

ericdoa

59

Caught up (in circles)

Syzy

60

Pastel Express

Cynax

61

St. Chroma (feat. Daniel Caesar)

Tyler, The Creator, Daniel Caesar

62

let's go home

Jane Remover

63

can you tell?

Jane Remover

64

champ

Jane Remover

65

pretender

Jane Remover

66

kodak moment

Jane Remover

67

movies for guys

Jane Remover

68

misplace

Jane Remover

69

Catch me if you can

tn-shi

70

natural

zeroth

71

mint

Snail's House

72

Emerald Lakeside - Action

はがね, Kitsui Akira

73

back off!!!

Jane Remover, kmoe, juno

74

one more life

Murphmusic, park.

75

Clinozoisite

Ludicin

76

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

underscores

77

Rabbit In The Black Room

Rabbit House

78

String Theocracy - Key Ingredient ver.

Mili

79

My guy (Corporate shuffle)

underscores

80

Wizards

xaev, mopearound

81

Everything Goes On

Porter Robinson, League of Legends

82

phobie d’impulsion

glaive

83

PUSH UR T3MPRR

femtanyl

84

Amethyst Aurora

BilliumMoto

85

the now now and never

what is your name?

86

Reverse Nightmare Tower

bye2

87

pop music

Limonène

88

EXACTLY WHY I'M STILL HERE - TURQUOISEDEATH Remix

bunnyprodge, TURQUOISEDEATH

89

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

glaive

90

Tojita Sekai

Camellia

91

commatose

glass beach

92

200

glass beach

93

until the dawn breaks

Deathbrain

94

dumb party

Internet Girl

95

skinz

8485

96

Algas Danses

seatrus

97

うみのゆき

seatrus

98

Palmy Flakes

seatrus

99

Cloud99 (As Above Mix)

Machine Girl

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