So you heard a song on Spotify, you’ve no idea of the title or artist, and now you can’t find it.
Well, you have a few options. While there isn't a screen or option to view your play history on mobile, there is a hack to view your most recently played songs.
On the Desktop app you have two options. You can quickly view your last 50 songs played, but if you want to go back further, you can request a copy of your Play History from Spotify.
Here’s how to do all three options.
How To View Your Play History On Mobile
Go to Your Library in the Spotify App.
Create a new playlist and give it a name.
Click 'Add Song'.
Spotify provides five screens of songs to swipe through. The fourth screen is a list of Recently Played songs.
How To View The Last 50 Songs You Listened To On Spotify
Start by opening the Desktop app and click on the Queue icon in the bottom right corner of the app.
This will display what songs are queued up to play next. Next to 'Queue' is the option to view History. Click on History to see the last 50 songs you've listened to.
Request Your Complete Play History From Spotify
If the song you are looking for is not among the 50 songs in your History, all is not lost. You can request your complete play history from Spotify.
To do this, log in to your Spotify account in a browser by going to Spotify.com and clicking on Log In. Alternatively, if you are already in Spotify, simply click on the drop-down menu next to your name and choose Account.
Once logged in, go to Privacy Settings. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called Download Your Data.
Click on the Request button to ask Spotify to send you a copy of all the information they have saved about you, which conveniently includes your play history.
After clicking the Request button, Spotify will send you an email asking you to confirm the request.
In total, you will receive three emails from Spotify. The first in the list is the confirmation for Spotify to initiate your request.
Click on Confirm, log back into Spotify, and you’ll receive a message confirming that Spotify is preparing your information.
The second email simply reiterates that Spotify is preparing your data and that it may take some time. They say it can take up to 30 days. In my case, it took only two days. I imagine it depends on your usage.
Finally, hopefully, just a few days later, you’ll receive a third email with a link to download your data. Click on the link, sign back into Spotify, and re-enter your password for verification.
Click verify to initiate the download.
Spotify provides all the information in a zip file so, having downloaded the file, right-click and choose Extract. The file contains all your data in various JSON formatted files. The file containing your play history is the largest of the files, called Streaming History0.json.
You can open the file in Notepad; however, it’s not very useful for searching the content. To turn the data into a more manageable format, I recommend converting the JSON file to a CSV. WE can then use Excel or Google Sheets to open the CSV file as a table.
Several free websites will convert the JSON file to CSV. I chose the first in Google’s search results.
Browse to your JSON file and click convert to CSV.
Download the resulting CSV file open it in Excel.
Expand the columns to suit and press CTRL, SHIFT + END to highlight all the cells.
Click on ‘Format as Table’ from the menu and pick a color for your table.
The result is your complete play history, which can be filtered by Artist.
Using Google Sheets
If you don’t have Excel, you can do the same thing in Google Sheets. Open Google Drive, create a new Sheet and choose File, Import.
Choose File, Import. Select the Upload tab, and drag your CSV file onto the tab. Click Import Data.
Google Sheets doesn’t have the same ‘Format as Table’ option that Excel offers, but you can make your list more presentable. Remove any columns you don’t need. Highlight two headings, and click on Filter.
Click this box in the top left corner to select all your data and choose Format and Alternative Colors from the menu.
Pick a color for your table, and the result is your complete Spotify History in Google Sheets.
How About You?
I’d love to hear if you found this article useful or if you’ve given this any of these options a try? Let me know by leaving a comment below.