Introduction to the Course

Get familiar with the Spotify API and look at what we'll cover in this course.

We'll cover the following

What is the Spotify?

The entertainment industry allows us to escape the monotony of today's fast-paced environment. Not only that, but it fosters creativity and allows us to connect with our friends and family. The music industry constitutes a vital part of the entertainment industry. To cater to the ever-increasing demand for music, several platforms have sprung up in the last decade or so.

One of those platforms is Spotify. It is a quite popular music streaming platform that provides access to millions of songs, podcasts, and videos along with other information such as details of artists, tracks, and shows.

What is an API?

An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. APIs help expose the capabilities of applications to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to their data.

Consider the case of a service like Spotify that provides us access to music and information about music. Building and exposing an API for this service will allow others to programmatically fetch the data this service offers, such as the newly-released songs or the top albums.

In addition, the Spotify API allows us to retrieve data about the tracks, artists, and podcasts available on Spotify.

We’ll look at the following in detail as we proceed through the course:

  • We’ll learn about the multiple authorization methods that Spotify API provides. We’ll also use two of these methods in our course.
  • We’ll then explore different endpoints that this API provides.
  • We’ll conclude the course by integrating the Spotify API into a demo React application.

To get the most out of this course, you should be familiar with the following:

  • Basic knowledge of API REST architecture.
  • The use of HTTP requests and basic knowledge of JSON objects, as we’ll make many API calls using HTTP requests that will return JSON objects in response.
  • The basics of JavaScript and React.