Context: I was Working on my Portfolio when it occurred to me that I could add a custom Spotify Widget to my website, So like most developers, I ignored every prebuilt widget and tried creating my own. I thought it would be cool if I could show the lyrics of the song that I am currently listening to. But unfortunately, Spotify doesn't provide any kind of lyrics API. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and make one myself.

PS: I forgot about my Portfolio 😅, But now I at least have the API.

You can visit my unfinished portfolio and try out Spot-API yourself.

Finding a Solution

So, as any good developer, I went to read the docs of Spotify, and I have only one thing to say, "those are bad". I couldn't find any reference to lyrics in entire docs.

Doing a little bit of Googling

So, I just googled it and found this on StackOverflow. We can request this to get the lyrics of any given track_id.

const url = `https://spclient.wg.spotify.com/color-lyrics/v2/track/${track_id}?format=json&vocalRemoval=false`;
let req = await fetch(url, {
  headers: {
    "app-platform": "WebPlayer",
    authorization: `Bearer ${ACCESS_TOKEN}`,
  },
});

let lyrics = await req.json();
console.log(lyrics);

Finding Access Token

As you can see this request would work if we had the ACCESS_TOKEN, and let me tell you that none of the tokens listed in Spotify docs works.

So, the solution is to do a little bit of observation in Spotify Web Player's Network tab, We can see that we can get an access token by requesting https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token, but this token is very short-lived. It expires after an hour.

The response looks like this,

{
  "clientId": "some-hexadecimal-number",
  "accessToken": "some-random-token",
  "accessTokenExpirationTimestampMs": 1686510137991,
  "isAnonymous": false
}

Renewing Access Token

We could just request again, but trying to do that from a fetch function returns a accessToken which is anonymous, that token is not useful. So how do we get a proper accessToken?

Enter Spotify User Cookie

Spotify User Cookie known as sp_dc is a Cookie that can be used to control your whole Spotify account, it is the only way to get a token capable of using the lyrics API. But you wouldn't want this kind of thing to be embedded in your front-end code. That's why we are going to create a serverless function that can do this for us without exposing any sensitive information to the client.

Obtaining the sp_dc Cookie

To obtain a sp_dc cookie you would likely want to create a new Spotify account so that even if your cookie gets leaked it doesn't affect you. Then you need to open a Private/Incognito Tab so that you couldn't accidentally log out and invalidate your Cookie.

• First Login Into your newly made account in a Private Tab

• Then open DevTools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I (or the binding specific to your OS/Browser)

• Goto Application Tab in Chrome (or any other Chromium-based browser) and find the sp_dc Cookie and Copy the value, Alternatively goto Storage Tab in Firefox and do the same

• Now close the Tab without logging out

Congratulations! You have obtained a Spotify User Cookie. Now this Cookie is valid for a year or until you revoke/log out of your Spotify Account. You need to keep an eye on this and act accordingly.

Minimal Implementation

After finding this I went to create a minimal solution, at that time I was working with Svelte, So I just created an Svelte Kit Project and added an API route with my findings. This Code is available in the legacy branch of my repo.

As You can see this code works within a Svelte API route.

Creating a Better Solution

As you can already tell deploying a SvelteKit App for only one API route is not the best idea. I opted in for Cloudflare Workers as I have been wanting to learn those. I also used the Hono Library as it makes handling paths easier.

So first we need to create a Cloudflare Worker Project.

pnpm create cloudflare@latest # Create a cloudflare Project

Then cd into your newly created project and install hono.

pnpm add hono

Now, open src/index.ts, delete boilerplate code and create a basic app

import { Hono } from "hono";

const app = new Hono();

app.get("/", async (ctx) => {
    ctx.text("This works!")
}

export default app;

Now run your app locally and navigate to https://localhost:8787/

pnpm wrangler dev

If all of this works you would see "This Works!" in your browser.

Now remove the "/" route and replace it with "/lyrics/:track_id", then edit the route like this.

app.get("/lyrics/:track_id", async (ctx) => {
    let { track_id } = ctx.req.params();
    ctx.text(track_id);
}

If you go to https://localhost:8787/lyrics/any-track-id then you would see "any-track-id" on the page which means we can get parameters from the requested URL.

We need to use the SPOTIFY_COOKIE safely in our app, so we need to create a .dev.vars file in the project root and our Cookie like this.

SPOTIFY_COOKIE=your-spotify-cookie

Then we need to edit our app like this and restart the dev server to have access to secret variables, its works like a .env file.

//--snip--
type Bindings = {
    SPOTIFY_COOKIE:string;
}

const app = new Hono<{Bindings: Bindings}>();
// You can access this value in a request with `ctx.env.SPOTIFY_COOKIE`

// We create these two global variables which we will need later
let ACCESS_TOKEN: string|null = null;
let ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRY: number = Date.now();
//--snip--

Now we can try to request a accessToken like this.

const predefinedRequestHeaders = {
  "User-Agent":
    "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/114.0",
  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",
  "Alt-Used": "open.spotify.com",
  "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1",
  "Sec-Fetch-Dest": "document",
  "Sec-Fetch-Mode": "navigate",
  "Sec-Fetch-Site": "cross-site",
};

const raw_data = await(
  await fetch("https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token", {
    headers: {
      ...predefinedRequestHeaders,
      Cookie: `sp_dc=${ctx.env.SPOTIFY_COOKIE}`,
    },
  })
).text();

try {
  const data: AccessTokenAPIData = JSON.parse(raw_data);
  ACCESS_TOKEN = data.accessToken;
  ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRY = data.accessTokenExpirationTimestampMs;
} catch (e) {
  console.log(e, raw_data);
  return new Response(JSON.stringify({ error: "Unknown Error Occurred!" }), {
    headers: { "content-type": "application/json; charset=utf-8" },
    status: 500,
  });
}

Through this, we will get the ACCESS_TOKEN and ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRY and save those in global variables for caching. With this, we can skip requesting new tokens on every request.

if (!ACCESS_TOKEN || ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRY <= Date.now()) {
    // Request new token
}
// otherwise continue with old one

Also, as you have seen we need a bunch of headers in the request which are defined in predefinedRequestHeaders, without these headers we will get a 403 Forbidden error, So we need to include these with every request.

Now finally we can hit the Lyrics API and retrieve the lyrics of the song.

const url = `https://spclient.wg.spotify.com/color-lyrics/v2/track/${track_id}?format=json&vocalRemoval=false`;
const lyrics = await (
  await fetch(url, {
    headers: {
      "app-platform": "WebPlayer",
      authorization: `Bearer ${ACCESS_TOKEN}`,
    },
  })
).text();

return new Response(
  lyrics === ""
    ? JSON.stringify({ error: "Lyrics are not available for this song" })
    : lyrics,
  {
    headers: { "content-type": "application/json; charset=utf-8" },
    status: lyrics === "" ? 404 : 200,
  }
);

To get the track_id of any song you could just share the song link and use the last part of the URL or you can set up another service that will give you the currently playing song. I am not going to cover that.

And like this now we have a working Spotify Lyrics API, full code with a bunch of improvements and checks is available in my GitHub repo. Feel free to check that and suggest improvements. Also, Star my GitHub repo as it helps a ton.

The Final Part: Deployment

You can check deployment instructions on the GitHub repo, so I am not repeating that part here.

Conclusion

As this is not a part of the Offical part of Spotify API, it is advised to use this personal projects only.

Also, this is my first blog post so feel free to correct me, You can also connect to me via Discord.

it's Blank Particle, Signing Out 👋