One of my favorite features in Spotify are the recommendations. The app’s recommendations includes the Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, Release Radar and the Artist Radio features. I could go through hours of recommendations substituting white noise while working on projects and usually encounter a song or an artist that appeals to my guitar/keyboard driven sensibilities in a session. While Discover Weekly, Daily Mix yield gems once in a while, the song specific ones usually based on Artist / Song radio yield a lot more matches to my sensibilities.
The recommendations endpoints that generates reccs based on a seed is a favorite. I’ve usually had a good match rate with songs that “stick” based on the API. There are plenty of other endpoints (artists, songs etc) that could be easily plugged in to generate relevant predictions.
The API documentation of Spotify has always been stellar and its usability is enhanced by being able to test all the API calls easily within their developer console.
This API also has a bunch of parameters that can be configured for fine-tuning the recommendation: key, genre, loudness, energy, instrumentalness, popularity, speechiness, danceability etc.
Per the official docs – “Recommendations are generated based on the available information for a given seed entity and matched against similar artists and tracks. If there is sufficient information about the provided seeds, a list of tracks will be returned together with pool size details. For artists and tracks that are very new or obscure there might not be enough data to generate a list of tracks.”
One of the key things here is to generate seeds for the recommendations, this can be done by using endpoints like Get a User’s Top Artists and Tracks to obtain artists and tracks based on my listening history and use these artists and tracks as seeds for the Get Recommendations Based on Seeds endpoint. This endpoint will only return tracks.
The Web API Authorization Guide is a must to read before querying these endpoints and the developer console makes it super easy to try out different endpoints.
I wanted a quick way to query the recommendations API for new recommendations and the combination of the streamlit + Spotify API was quick simple solve to get that working. At a high level I wanted to be able to query a song or artist and generate recommendations based on it. A secondary need is also to collect data for a reccomender I am training to customize ML-driven reccomendations but more on that in a different post.
A lot of the code is boilerplate and pretty self explanatory but at a high level it consists of the class to interact with the Spotify API (spotify_api.py) , a UI wrapper using Streamlit to render the app (spotify_explorer.py). Given a client id and client secret, spotify_api.py gets client credentials from the Spotify API to invoke the search. Sample code inline with comments. The code can obviously be much more modular and pythonic but for investing a quick hour of hacking, this got the job done.
class SpotifyAPI(object):
access_token = None
access_token_expires = datetime.datetime.now()
access_token_did_expire = True
client_id = None
client_secret = None
token_url = 'https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token'
def __init__(self, client_id, client_secret, *args, **kwargs):
self.client_id = client_id
self.client_secret = client_secret
# Given a client id and client secret, gets client credentials from the Spotify API.
def get_client_credentials(self):
''' Returns a base64 encoded string '''
client_id = self.client_id
client_secret = self.client_secret
if client_secret == None or client_id == None:
raise Exception("check client IDs")
client_creds = f"{client_id}:{client_secret}"
client_creds_b64 = base64.b64encode(client_creds.encode())
return client_creds_b64.decode()
def get_token_header(self): # Get header
client_creds_b64 = self.get_client_credentials()
return {"Authorization": f"Basic {client_creds_b64}"}
def get_token_data(self): # Get token
return {
"grant_type": "client_credentials"
}
def perform_auth(self): # perform auth only if access token has expired
token_url = self.token_url
token_data = self.get_token_data()
token_headers = self.get_token_header()
r = requests.post(token_url, data=token_data, headers=token_headers)
if r.status_code not in range(200, 299):
print("Could not authenticate client")
data = r.json()
now = datetime.datetime.now()
access_token = data["access_token"]
expires_in = data['expires_in']
expires = now + datetime.timedelta(seconds=expires_in)
self.access_token = access_token
self.access_token_expires = expires
self.access_token_did_expire = expires < now
return True
def get_access_token(self):
token = self.access_token
expires = self.access_token_expires
now = datetime.datetime.now()
if expires < now:
self.perform_auth()
return self.get_access_token()
elif token == None:
self.perform_auth()
return self.get_access_token()
return token
# search for an artist/track based on a search type provided
def search(self, query, search_type="artist"):
access_token = self.get_access_token()
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": f"Bearer { access_token}"}
# using the search API at https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/search/search/
search_url = "https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?"
data = {"q": query, "type": search_type.lower()}
from urllib.parse import urlencode
search_url_formatted = urlencode(data)
search_r = requests.get(
search_url+search_url_formatted, headers=headers)
if search_r.status_code not in range(200, 299):
print("Encountered isse=ue")
return search_r.json()
return search_r.json()
def get_meta(self, query, search_type="track"): # meta data of a track
resp = self.search(query, search_type)
all = []
for i in range(len(resp['tracks']['items'])):
track_name = resp['tracks']['items'][i]['name']
track_id = resp['tracks']['items'][i]['id']
artist_name = resp['tracks']['items'][i]['artists'][0]['name']
artist_id = resp['tracks']['items'][i]['artists'][0]['id']
album_name = resp['tracks']['items'][i]['album']['name']
images = resp['tracks']['items'][i]['album']['images'][0]['url']
raw = [track_name, track_id, artist_name, artist_id, images]
all.append(raw)
return all
The get_recommended_songs function is the core of the app querying the API for results based on the query passed in. The more the parameters the better the results. Customizing the call to any API call is fairly trivial.
def get_reccomended_songs(self, limit=5, seed_artists='', seed_tracks='', market="US",
seed_genres="rock", target_danceability=0.1): # reccomendations API
access_token = self.get_access_token()
endpoint_url = "https://api.spotify.com/v1/recommendations?"
all_recs = []
self.limit = limit
self.seed_artists = seed_artists
self.seed_tracks = seed_tracks
self.market = market
self.seed_genres = seed_genres
self.target_danceability = target_danceability
# API query plus some additions
query = f'{endpoint_url}limit={limit}&market={market}&seed_genres={seed_genres}&target_danceability={target_danceability}'
query += f'&seed_artists={seed_artists}'
query += f'&seed_tracks={seed_tracks}'
response = requests.get(query, headers={
"Content-type": "application/json", "Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}"})
json_response = response.json()
# print(json_response)
if response:
print("Reccomended songs")
for i, j in enumerate(json_response['tracks']):
track_name = j['name']
artist_name = j['artists'][0]['name']
link = j['artists'][0]['external_urls']['spotify']
print(f"{i+1}) \"{j['name']}\" by {j['artists'][0]['name']}")
reccs = [track_name, artist_name, link]
all_recs.append(reccs)
return all_recs
Wrapping both the calls in a Streamlist app is refreshingly simple and dockerizing and pushing to Azure container registry was trivial.
Code
https://github.com/vishwanath79/spotifier
Usage
To run the app, run:
streamlit run spotify_explorer.py
Deployed at
https://spotiapp2.azurewebsites.net/
Part 2 to follow at some point as I continue building out a custom recommender that compares the current personalizer with a custom personalizer that takes in Audio features and more personalized inputs and tuneable parameters.