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