spotify-buddylist

Fetch the friend activity Spotify feed.

Overview

The Spotify API doesn't include a way to fetch the friend activity feed that's available on the right of the desktop app.

There's an issue on the spotify/web-api repository about that, where a number of people request access to this endpoint since 2015, but it was closed this summer 2020 without any plan to give access to this feature through the official API.

Because I want to fetch this data and I don't like being told no, this repo is a wrapper around the unofficial API that the app calls to fetch the friend activity feed.

Since the calls are pretty trivial, it's mostly there for public documentation purpose rather than to really be used as a library, but I still made it available on npm in case you quickly want to put together with this.

The only dependency is node-fetch to make HTTP requests.

Usage

To use this API, you need to get a web player access token, not a regular API access token, so you can't use the official API way of logging in, getting and refreshing tokens.

The good news is that if you don't mind logging in on the web player and refreshing a value in your code once a year, it's actually quite easier. More on that below.

const buddyList = require('spotify-buddylist')

const { accessToken } = await buddyList.getWebAccessToken(spDcCookie)
const friendActivity = await buddyList.getFriendActivity(accessToken)

The output looks like:

{
  "friends": [
    {
      "timestamp": 1600773735000,
      "user": {
        "uri": "spotify:user:shaktirockgym",
        "name": "shaktirockgym"
      },
      "track": {
        "uri": "spotify:track:51xHvAUYQfhY29GcGlBM0n",
        "name": "Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major, K. 545 \"Sonata facile\": 1. Allegro",
        "imageUrl": "http://i.scdn.co/image/ab67616d0000b273bf4b533ee6e9634a6fcd8882",
        "album": {
          "uri": "spotify:album:1XORY4rQNhqkZxTze6Px90",
          "name": "Piano Book (Deluxe Edition)"
        },
        "artist": {
          "uri": "spotify:artist:4NJhFmfw43RLBLjQvxDuRS",
          "name": "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart"
        },
        "context": {
          "uri": "spotify:user:spotify:playlist:37i9dQZF1E4riV8HyBkA7r",
          "name": "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Radio",
          "index": 0
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

sp_dc cookie

This is the only value that you need for this to work. After you login on the web player (which I don't automate because reCAPTCHA), you get a bunch of cookies, including one named sp_dc.

Seems like it's valid for one year, and with just that value you can call anytime an endpoint that gives you a refreshed, elevated API access token, that, unlike the official API ones, will let you query the undocumented endpoint that retrieves the friend activity.

Usage with spotify-web-api-node

You might already be using the spotify-web-api-node package to use the official API. For convenience, I included a method to wrap it to include the getWebAccessToken and getFriendActivity methods on it.

Using it that way, you can leverage the same elevated token for all the official API requests as well.

const SpotifyWebApi = require('spotify-web-api-node')
const buddyList = require('spotify-buddylist')

const api = buddyList.wrapWebApi(new SpotifyWebApi({ spDcCookie }))

const tokenResponse = await api.getWebAccessToken()
api.setAccessToken(tokenResponse.body.accessToken)

const friendActivityResponse = await api.getFriendActivity()
const friendActivity = friendActivityResponse.body

Should your script run more than the token response's accessTokenExpirationTimestampMs (currently an hour), I would suggest implementing token refresh logic which is just calling getWebAccessToken and setAccessToken again like above.