README

Inspect Spotify's top hits playlists and see what we can learn.

• What kind of data does Spotify extract and keep for each song? (which in turn helps it recommend songs to us)
• How have the properties of top-hit songs changed over the last few decades?

This project also has code to query Spotify's servers for the most up-to-date data using HTTPS (same protocol used by Chrome and all browsers to serve webpages to you). A little more detail below.

How to download data from Spotify

1. Ask Spotify for permission to pull data from its servers. This requires an "OAuth token", which is a password that's only valid for 1 hour, details at footnote (1). The instructions show a Javascript way of getting the password, but you can do it in Python too.

2. Using the OAuth token, send HTTPS requests to Spotify's servers to get the data. Then, process the data -- pick out only the pieces we want, and discard the rest (this requires lots of experimenting, not shown in the final code). This is all done in the notebook:

    get_data.ipynb
   

3. Make a home-made library, to try to present the data in a cleaner way for coding club. You can see the actual code for the get(...) and show_data(...) methods in:

    coding_club.py
   

Footnotes

1. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/authorization/client-credentials/
2. https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/