I’m working on a music sharing application and I’m stuck on one particular feature. The idea is to create a social experience where users can view what songs their friends are currently streaming on Spotify.
So far I’ve managed to retrieve my own active track using the player endpoint without any issues. I can also fetch other users’ top tracks and playlists by passing their userID to the appropriate API calls.
However, I can’t seem to find a way to access real-time playback information from other users’ accounts. Does anyone know if there’s a specific API method or workaround to get currently playing songs from friends’ profiles? Any guidance would be really helpful.
Nope, Spotify killed off direct access to friends’ real-time listening data through their API. Found this out the hard way on a project a couple years back. Their Web API docs are pretty clear - you need explicit permission from each user you want to track, which defeats the whole purpose. I pivoted to a push notification system instead. Users could share their current track with friends with just one tap when they wanted to. Making it frictionless was key. You could also tap into platforms where people already share music naturally - Instagram stories, Twitter, that kind of thing. Turns out the manual approach was actually better for privacy, and users loved having that control.
You’re hitting the same brick wall every developer faces with Spotify’s API. They killed real-time friend activity around 2017-2018 because of privacy issues and people abusing it. I wasted weeks trying to reverse engineer this before giving up. Your only real option is building your own sharing system. Let users manually broadcast what they’re listening to through your app’s backend. Set up webhooks to grab playback events from users who opt in, then push that data to their friends on your platform. Some devs use Last.fm’s API as a backup since it tracks listening history, but it’s not real-time. The trick is making sharing so easy that people actually want to do it.
totally agree, they messed up the fun stuff! we need to rely on friends sharing what they’re jamming on. maybe create a feature where they can post their tracks manually? would keep things social.
Yeah, Spotify killed this feature years ago because of privacy issues. Their /v1/me/player/currently-playing endpoint only works for your own account - you can’t see what friends are playing anymore. I ran into the same wall building something similar last year. Here’s what I did instead: built an opt-in system where users can broadcast their tracks to friends through the app. Users log in with Spotify, grab their current song, then share it via your backend to whoever they’re connected with. You could also try Discord’s Rich Presence API if your users hang out there - it’ll show Spotify activity when people turn it on. But they need Discord running and have to enable the feature themselves.
yeah, spotify locked this down hard after apps were scraping user data without permission. I tried building something like this and had to pivot to a “now playing” feed where users manually share tracks. actually works better since people only share what they want friends to see.