The Player API has been used by thousands of developers to make third-party apps for home automation, social listening, music discovery, and much more. The Spotify Connect Web API extended these innovations to the web, and it now allows developers to control Spotify playback from any internet-connected device or app. Developers used this opportunity to extend the Spotify experience into a variety of creative apps for their own personal use, for friends, and for other Spotify users. Through AppleScript, third-party developers could start or stop the music that was playing from Spotify’s Mac app and observe the title of the track that was playing. Prior to shipping the Connect Web API, Spotify offered a public interface that allowed developers to connect to Spotify’s Mac desktop application from another app running on Mac OS X. This post presents an overview of what you can do with the API, now called the Player API, and some background information about how it came to exist.

In 2017, we launched the Spotify Connect Web API, a set of tools that developers could use to programmatically start, stop, and manage Spotify audio playback from the web.

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