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

media offline

ariiol

1

The End

Danny Brown, ta Ukrainka, Zheani, Cynthoni

2

Music and Me

fakemink

3

MIRINAE

TAK, Zekk

4

Rain Capsule

Namitape

5

Overfeel

Namitape

6

All At Once

Ninajirachi

7

Infohazard

Ninajirachi

8

Delete

Ninajirachi

9

weathergirl

FLAVOR FOLEY

10

Lawsyn

ayowitty

11

THUNDRRR

Quadeca

12

THAT'S WHY

Quadeca

13

WAGING WAR

Quadeca, Olēka

14

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Quadeca

15

Always Have Always Will

Jane Remover

16

SLAM PUNK

Che

17

Akibare

Mylta

18

My life is mine alone! (feat. nenne)

Mylta, nenne

19

disarmed

kumosai, Sayako

20

spectrum

icesawder

21

NOWNEVER

Jaron

22

Pretty Peach

Lucy Bedroque

23

How to Pretend

Lucy Bedroque

24

Knot Me

Lucy Bedroque

25

Sweet Pitcher

Lucy Bedroque

26

Thousand yard stare

kmoe

27

angels in camo

Jane Remover

28

Professional Vengeance

Jane Remover

29

Dreamflasher

Jane Remover

30

Experimental Skin

Jane Remover

31

Psychoboost

Jane Remover, Danny Brown

32

Dancing with your eyes closed

Jane Remover

33

Spider

venturing

34

Believe

venturing

35

alucarda lives!

smiling broadly

36

fake blood recipe

smiling broadly

37

flower bed

defsharp

38

sheaskedwhatmylifeislike

ericdoa

39

Caught up (in circles)

Syzy

40

Pastel Express

Cynax

41

St. Chroma (feat. Daniel Caesar)

Tyler, The Creator, Daniel Caesar

42

let's go home

Jane Remover

43

can you tell?

Jane Remover

44

champ

Jane Remover

45

pretender

Jane Remover

46

kodak moment

Jane Remover

47

movies for guys

Jane Remover

48

misplace

Jane Remover

49

Catch me if you can

tn-shi

50

natural

zeroth

51

mint

Snail's House

52

Emerald Lakeside - Action

はがね, Kitsui Akira

53

back off!!!

Jane Remover, kmoe, juno

54

one more life

Murphmusic, park.

55

Clinozoisite

Ludicin

56

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

underscores

57

Rabbit In The Black Room

Rabbit House

58

String Theocracy - Key Ingredient ver.

Mili

59

My guy (Corporate shuffle)

underscores

60

Wizards

xaev, mopearound

61

Everything Goes On

Porter Robinson, League of Legends

62

phobie d’impulsion

glaive

63

PUSH UR T3MPRR

femtanyl

64

Amethyst Aurora

BilliumMoto

65

the now now and never

what is your name?

66

Reverse Nightmare Tower

bye2

67

pop music

Limonène

68

EXACTLY WHY I'M STILL HERE - TURQUOISEDEATH Remix

bunnyprodge, TURQUOISEDEATH

69

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

glaive

70

Tojita Sekai

Camellia

71

commatose

glass beach

72

200

glass beach

73

until the dawn breaks

Deathbrain

74

dumb party

Internet Girl

75

skinz

8485

76

Algas Danses

seatrus

77

うみのゆき

seatrus

78

Palmy Flakes

seatrus

79

Cloud99 (As Above Mix)

Machine Girl

80

enchanted love

linear ring

81

Midnight Theater

Kano, Nagi Nemoto

82

Mola mola

Marmalade butcher

83

Another Ride

ippo.tsk, Synthesizer V ANRI

84

neon glow

glass beach

85

I Still Miss You

bo en, Tomggg

86

(We Are) Friends

bo en, Winamp Boys

87

Our Time

bo en, PAS TASTA

88

Kansoku-eisei

Nanahira, Camellia

89

GURUGURU

Snail's House

90

About 10 Hours of Doubting Myself

Yem

91

GHOST OF LORELEY

lasah

92

awesome ends with ME and ugly starts with U

c0ncernn

93

DILF repellent

c0ncernn

94

タイニーリトル・アジアンタム

ShibayanRecords

95

lastnaut

Sleeping Pola

96

NekovhParavh

Sad Keyboard Guy, Gardens

97

cool delusions about morphing into a cat

crxw

98

Blooming Afternoon

ミツキヨ

99

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

uma, Morimori Atsushi, MisoilePunch♪

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