spotify-mcp

An MCP server that lets MCP clients build and edit Spotify playlists from a description. "Moody 90s trip-hop for a rainy commute", "add three more like the last one", "drop anything over five minutes", etc. This is just a personal project intended for personal use, if you find it useful, that's a side effect, and you're welcome to use it.

How it works

Spotify deprecated /recommendations, /audio-features, /audio-analysis and related-artists for every app created after 2024-11-27, they return 403 and have no replacement. So the model itself is the recommendation engine. These seven tools give it the three things it can't do itself:

There's a similar project named spotify-mcp-server by Marcel Marais that exposes many more functionalities. If you want to use this tool but find that the current list of exposed functions aren't enough for what you want to do, I'd recommend looking at his MCP server instead.

Related MCP server: spotify-mcp

Setup

1. Create a Spotify app

At developer.spotify.com/dashboard → Create app.

Footgun 1 — the redirect URI. Spotify rejects localhost. Register the IP literal, exactly: http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback

Footgun 2 — the allowlist. New apps are in development mode: capped at 5 users, and each one must be added under Settings → User Management by their Spotify account email — including your own. Miss this and every API call 403s despite a perfectly valid token. (Extended quota has been organizations-only since 2025-05-15 and requires 250k+ monthly actives, so 5 users is the practical ceiling.)

Copy the Client ID and Client secret.

2. Build and log in

npm install && npm run build

export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID=...
export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=...
npm run login

npm run login prints an authorization URL (and tries to open your browser), catches the callback on 127.0.0.1:8888, and writes a refresh token to ~/.config/spotify-mcp/token.json with mode 0600. One time only — the server refreshes access tokens itself from then on.

Scopes requested: playlist-modify-public, playlist-modify-private, playlist-read-private, playlist-read-collaborative, user-top-read. No playback scopes — this server doesn't control playback.

3. Register with your MCP client

claude mcp add spotify \
  --env SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID=... \
  --env SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  -- node /absolute/path/to/spotify-mcp/dist/index.js

Or in a client config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "spotify": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/spotify-mcp/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID": "...",
        "SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET": "..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Then just ask: "Make me a 20-track playlist of moody 90s trip-hop for a rainy commute."

Development

npm test     # node:test, no framework — chunking, pagination, token refresh, error handling
npm run build
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/index.js   # poke the tools by hand

Set SPOTIFY_MCP_TOKEN_FILE to override the token location.

Stack: @modelcontextprotocol/server v2 + zod. Everything else is a Node built-in — no express, no axios, no dotenv, no Spotify client library.

Notes

• Auth flow: authorization code with client secret, not PKCE. Spotify doesn't rotate refresh tokens on this flow, so there's no lose-the-write-lose-the-account failure mode. Everything stays on loopback.

• Not included: playback control, playlist rename/reorder, saved-library reads. Add when wanted.