Making Music Cool; Get Lyrics From Spotify Music

(image from Unsplash)

I love music. Growing up I was introduced to different genres at a pretty young age. My dad’s love for jazz and my brother’s hip-hop nature. I appreciate and love all genres of music. Most importantly, I love the words that compose a song. Words are big for me in music. With my love for H.E.R, J Cole and Kendrick Lamar based on their choices of words in their art.

Apple Music has a pretty cool feature of getting the lyrics of the song while playing. In my bid to wanting to enjoy something like that from Spotify, I found myself looking at APIs that can help me achieve this task. An easy task when using the Spotify API to retrieve the song playing and the genius API to get the lyrics of the song (Thanks to my cool Data Scientist Friend who put me to the task of grabbing lyrics of some songs from genius for a pretty cool project- watch out for his project, he is AWESOME). You can find his profile here.

I know at this point, you are tired of reading. Let’s get to the cool stuff.

In order to get started, we need to sign up to use the Spotify API. you can do so here and create an app. After doing so, let’s get the client id and secret code. Also, add a direct URL ‘http://localhost:8888/callback/‘ to your created app.

'''Spotify API credential'''

#getting my spotify credntials 
USERNAME = 'Your username'
SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID = 'client id'
SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET = 'client secret code'
SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI = 'http://localhost:8888/callback/'

Do not forget to install the Spotipy by using the ‘pip install command’ (pip install spotipy)

pip install spotipy

let’s retrieve the song name and artist name of the music we are listening to on spotify.

import spotipy
import spotipy.util as util

from config import USERNAME, SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID, SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET,SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI, access_token
import lyricsgenius 

#this is to tell spotify what you are doing with the script.
#'https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/scopes/'
scope = 'user-read-currently-playing'

# providing credentials 
token = util.prompt_for_user_token(
    USERNAME, scope, client_id=SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID, client_secret=SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET, redirect_uri=SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI)


if token:
    # intialize with the token to gain access 
    sp = spotipy.Spotify(auth=token)
    # retrive name of song playing on spotify now 
    current_song = sp.currently_playing()
    # Extract artist
    artist = current_song['item']['artists'][0]['name']
    # Extract song name 
    song_name = current_song['item']['name']

		#print out the extracted items 
    print('\nSong: {}\nArtist: {}'.format(song_name, artist))

We are then going to feed this information into the genius api but first let’s setup the environment.

With available this API, the task of getting song lyrics by an artist has rather been simplified. To get the ball rolling, first you have to sign up for the Genius Api on here. Once that is done, install the model by running the line below in your terminal. This is the python client for the Genius API.

pip install lyricsgenius

Generate your access token after signing up. We need it for our codes to work! Do not forget that. Now, save your access token.

access_token = 'Your Copied Token Goes Here'

Let’s get the lyrics now!!!!! shall we!

# using the genius api to get the lyrics 
    #getting the lyrics of songs by the artist 
    genius = lyricsgenius.Genius(access_token)
    song = genius.search_song(song_name, artist)
    songlyrics = song.lyrics
    print(songlyrics)

Let’s see the full codes, save and run in our terminal.

import spotipy
import spotipy.util as util

from config import USERNAME, SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID, SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET,SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI, access_token
import lyricsgenius 

scope = 'user-read-currently-playing'

# To connect succesfully you need to provide your own Spotify Credentials
# You can do this signing up in https://developer.spotify.com/ and creating a new app.
token = util.prompt_for_user_token(
    USERNAME, scope, client_id=SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID, client_secret=SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET, redirect_uri=SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI)

if token:
    # Create a Spotify() instance with our token
    sp = spotipy.Spotify(auth=token)
    # method currently playing return an actual song on Spotify
    current_song = sp.currently_playing()
    # Extract artist from json response
    artist = current_song['item']['artists'][0]['name']
    # Extract song name from json response
    song_name = current_song['item']['name']

    print('\nSong: {}\nArtist: {}'.format(song_name, artist))

    # using the genius api to get the lyrics 
    #getting the lyrics of songs by the artist 
    genius = lyricsgenius.Genius(access_token)
    song = genius.search_song(song_name, artist)
    songlyrics = song.lyrics
    print(songlyrics)

else:
    print("token can not be found for", username)

That’s it guys. Thank you for checking this out. Enjoy music, it is the food for the soul❤️.