How does stats.fm get lifetime listening history?

[nkatti]

hi all,

wondering if anyone knows how apps/services like stats.fm gain access to users’ lifetime listening history? I haven’t paid for their service, so I’m not sure exactly what lifetime data they make available, but I think they’re able to show how many times you’ve listened to a particular song/artist 

Spotify’s public API endpoint for listening history (Get Recently Played History ) only provides the most recent 50 songs. Are they potentially using something like Get User’s Top Items instead? I don’t think this gives you data beyond the “top” songs for a certain period, so still not sure how stats.fm is doing it. 

thanks!

[Hunter__]

Stats.fm as far as I know does not have access to a user's lifetime history and relies on the the JSON files uploaded by the user to calculate lifetime stats. You can retrieve your lifetime history by going to https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/ I'm almost certain that stats.fm uses that endpoint to keep user history up to date, but not to get a user's entire history. 

[nkatti]

 

Hmm, I guess that would make more sense. In the attached screenshot, you can see that they have statistics for Total Tracks Streamed, Total Hours Streamed, etc. for lifetime, so I assumed they somehow had access to the full history. I can purchase Pro access to confirm, but wanted to check here first. 

I’ve also seen people post how many times they’ve listened to a certain Album, which seems impossible to do without full history. But maybe those folks are uploading their JSONs from Spotify 

 

[aryankhandal0]

As a premium user of stats.fm they ask you to download your history from Spotify and use the above API to keep it updated.

[nkatti]

Thanks! I ended up paying for stats.fm’s lifetime premium plan. And yep, confirming that lifetime history is initially loaded via Spotify’s data export function, and then stats.fm tracks history thereafter.

[homefrieswelldone]

so if i were to pay for the lifetime subscription, they can retroactively give me stats? tia

[nkatti]

if you pay for the lifetime subscription, they’ll then ask you to request your lifetime data from Spotify and upload it. it’s honestly no different than getting your data yourself and throwing some reporting together, but I like the app a lot. uploading your lifetime data is a one-time thing - they’re then able to keep your stats up to date by using the API endpoint that returns your most recently played songs.