MetaGrab

MetaGrab

A webapp that grabs Spotify's metadata for any track you'd like!

What is this?

This is a small little webapp that grabs Spotify's metadata about any track on its platform. Metadata is data about other data. Track metadata can include artists, what album the track appeared on, and the qualitative feel of the track. If you are ever curious about what Spotify thinks of a particular track and about what it uses to feed its recommendation algorithms, this is for you!

How do I use this?

To use this webapp, you simply have to type in the name and/or artist of the song that you wish to look up in the search bar, and click on it in the search results!
If you are confused about any terms that are used on this site: Try mousing over the term for a tooltip explaining what it is.
If the track you wish to search for does not show up in the search results: Paste the ID given by Spotify into the search bar and press Enter. IDs are base-62 identifiers that look like this: 0g5J7GjfRxsunVrrcDLejQ. These can be obtained by right-clicking a track in the Spotify client and either copying the Spotify URI or the Link, both of which contain the ID within them.

How accurate is this?

Spotify's metadata generally does accurately tell you track information. However, because their systems to derive this information are probably based around algorithms and machine learning, there are innaccuracies.

• Personally, I've been able to find tracks where the tempo is completely innaccurate
• I've found tracks where the valence (happiness) score were very low for very happy songs
• I've seen tracks that have a different overall dataset than anything seen in the sections
• etc.

Not to mention, the metadata that Spotify does return is not the most ideal.

• Genre is not stored under tracks nor albums, only artists, which is ridiculous because many artists are very diverse in their music, and treating all of their songs as the same set of genres is ridiculous (this is why you don't see genre on here!)
• Time signature is only given as one integer. Based off the docs, I've simply made an assumption I know to be incorrect and just put all of the numbers over 4
• Search results are region-locked to one country, which defaults to the United States unless otherwise specified
• An empty array is returned for the available markets if the track is not available in the same market the token is associated with
• Spotify is unclear as to what data is provided by the artist/distributor and what data is inferred via their automated systems.

How does this work?

The backend is my own API written in Go. It queries the Spotify API and serves modified JSON of the results it gets. My API is available under the APGL v3.0 on my GitHub repo. This frontend is written sloppily with ReactJS (frontend sucks.), using some elements from Bootstrap and other projects.