How to export your data from Spotify

Requesting the GDPR export, what arrives, and how to open it.

easy Wait: a few days for account data, up to thirty days for the full history

Spotify is required to give you a copy of the data it holds about you, including records. The request itself is free, and arrives as .zip containing JSON. Typical wait: a few days for account data, up to thirty days for the full history.

Spotify privacy settings

Step by step

  1. Open Account, then Privacy settings

    Scroll to Download your data.

  2. Tick extended streaming history, not just account data

    This is the important step. Account data covers the past year only. Extended streaming history covers the entire life of the account.

  3. Confirm from the email

    Nothing starts until you click the link.

  4. Wait

    Spotify quotes thirty days for both. In practice the extended history has often arrived faster than the standard package.

  5. Download and keep the zip

    Playlists, library, search history and every stream you have ever played are inside.

Opening your Spotify export

Muletto reads a Spotify export directly - the zip, without unpacking it first - and finds the records inside.

It runs in the browser: the archive is never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is installed. Open several exports at once and they become one library, with the photographs that appear in more than one of them found automatically.

What the default request leaves out, and it is most of it: the standard download covers roughly the last year of listening. Everything before that is Extended streaming history, which is a separate tick on the same page and is answered on a completely different timescale - days for the standard one, weeks for the extended. If you want your listening history rather than your recent listening, tick it, and expect to wait. Spotify has also had spells where extended history came back with streams missing the identifiers that say which track was played, which makes those rows unusable; if yours looks like that, request it again rather than assuming that is all there is.

Open your Spotify export

Worth knowing

What the default request leaves out, and it is most of it: the standard download covers roughly the last year of listening. Everything before that is Extended streaming history, which is a separate tick on the same page and is answered on a completely different timescale - days for the standard one, weeks for the extended. If you want your listening history rather than your recent listening, tick it, and expect to wait. Spotify has also had spells where extended history came back with streams missing the identifiers that say which track was played, which makes those rows unusable; if yours looks like that, request it again rather than assuming that is all there is.
The two packages are requested together but arrive separately, sometimes days apart. It is easy to open the first one and assume that is all there is.
Files are numbered with a counter that never resets, and sorting them alphabetically puts part 10 before part 2.
A field recording whether a track was skipped was not populated at all between 2015 and late 2022.

Common questions

How do I get my full Spotify listening history?

Tick extended streaming history when you request. The default account data package only covers the last twelve months; the extended one covers everything since you opened the account.

How long does a Spotify data request take?

Spotify says up to thirty days. Reports vary from a few hours to about a week, and the extended history has often arrived before the standard package.

What is in a Spotify extended streaming history?

Every track you have played, with the timestamp, how many milliseconds you listened for, the device platform and why playback started and stopped.