#10: Reverse Engineering the Spotify API

In this episode, we talked about the Spotify for Podcasters API and how to use it to extract data from Spotify. We also talked about the different data types that can be extracted and how to store the data in a MySQL database.

The API consists of internal endpoints for fetching metadata, episodes, and detailed streams, listeners, followers, and aggregate data. To use the API we need to fetch the authentication token for a user. Notably this is not the user's Spotify account.

The data can be stored in a MySQL database. We can then use the data to answer complex questions such as "What topics perform the best?" and "What are the preferences of specific age groups?" This is much more flexible than using official Spotify for Podcasters dashboard. Furthermore the data will be available for further analysis for an arbitrary time period and can be used to create a custom dashboard.

Links

• Explanation on how to retrieve the Spotify cookie for fetching data: https://den.dev/blog/unlocking-spotify-podcast-data/
• An OSS library for fetching Spotify Podcast data and more: https://github.com/wdr-data/wdr-okr/
• Our code: https://github.com/openpodcast

Hosts

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler)
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

Feedback

• Email: [e-mail]
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev

Credits

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.