I listen to a lot of Spotify music. As most Spotify users know, at the end of the year they summarize your year of music for you. It is one of the things I really look forward to, because it combines both statistics and music together. But I did want something more detailed. And I wanted more control over what I would be shown.
Spotify's API is able to give out the top artists and tracks but not more than that regarding long-time use. However, it also allows to give specific information about the user's recently played songs (limited to 50). This is what I use to collect statistics in a PostgreSQL database.
I decided on several different tables for the played song (including timestamp), the context (if available), the track itself, the artist and the album.
A PostgreSQL database needs to be in place. The schema for this can be found in dump.sql.
Follow Spotify's guide to create a client id (and secret). Follow through until you have a refresh token you can use. The Authorization Scope needed for this script is user-read-recently-played.
config.ini.example needs to get changed:
- fill in the details of your database
- fill in the client id, secret and refresh token from the last step
- save as config.ini in the same directory
Make sure you have all requirements from requirements.txt installed.
You should now be able to run the script. To get the most out of the script it will have to be run regularly, resulting in a continuous logging of the recently played tracks. Looking at Spotify's reference for Recently Played Tracks it can be calculated that with a time of 25 minutes inbetween will be enough to ensure a full coverage since the last 50 songs can be returned by Spotify and a song has to play at least 30 seconds to be counted.