Why is OAuth required for a search?

[chrissy_a]

I want to use Spotify's search API (https://api.spotify.com/v1/search)  as a source for searching for track names, maybe use album cover thumbnails etc., but I don't want to do anything related to a user's account, play any songs, modify playlists etc. I'm only interested in the raw data.

For this use case it doesn't seem like it's necessary to get a user's OAuth token. Is there a way around this? I guess I could create a dummy account or use my own, but I think there could be some issues related to that.

[RoguePlanetoid · Accepted solution]

You can use the Client Credentials flow to do something like this, that only requires the Client Id and Secret, although this is only recommended for server-side applications where this information cannot be intercepted.