How to Search for Songs Using the Spotify REST API

May 08, 2025

How to Search for Songs Using the Spotify REST API (With JavaScript Example)

If you’ve ever wanted to integrate Spotify's vast music catalog into your own application, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ll explore how to use the Spotify REST API to search for songs programmatically using JavaScript.

What You’ll Need

A free Spotify Developer account
A registered application to get your Client ID and Client Secret
Basic knowledge of JavaScript and APIs

Step 1: Get Access Token (Client Credentials Flow)

Spotify requires an OAuth token to use most of its API endpoints. For simple read-only operations like search, you can use the Client Credentials flow.

POST https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token
Headers:
  Authorization: Basic Base64(client_id:client_secret)
  Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Body:
  grant_type=client_credentials

This will return an access_token that you can use for your requests.

Step 2: Make a Search Request

Once you have your token, you can call the search endpoint like this:

GET https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=QUERY&type=track

Example using JavaScript with fetch:

<script>
const token = "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"; // replace with actual token
const query = "Imagine Dragons";

fetch(`https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=${encodeURIComponent(query)}&type=track`, {
  headers: {
    "Authorization": `Bearer ${token}`
  }
})
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(data => {
    const tracks = data.tracks.items;
    console.log("Top Results:", tracks);
    tracks.forEach(track => {
      console.log(`${track.name} by ${track.artists.map(a => a.name).join(", ")}`);
    });
  });
</script>

Output

This script will log the top matching tracks and their artists to the console. You can then use this data to display results in your app or website.

Conclusion

Integrating Spotify’s search API into your project can open up powerful ways to explore music programmatically. This is just the beginning — you can also fetch full track details, albums, playlists, and more using similar API calls.

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