How to show a song, track, album or artist from Spotify in Blogger

This article shows how you can embed tracks or albums from Spotify in your blog or website, even if you don't use Spotify yourself.

About putting tracks from Spotify onto your website

If you have a blog / website about music, then you probably want to share clips with your readers.

Many music and video hosting sites let you do this by embedding them: this means that you allow YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo, etc) to use some space on your site to show a particular piece of their content, with their logo / brand attached to it. They do this because it gives them exposure - and you get to keep the visit on your site instead of sending them away.

There are some music-recordings which are on Spotify, but aren't on any of the other music systems. Today, when I google "how to embed from Spotify, I get instructions which say "just right-click on the item in Spotify, and choose embed"  (sometimes using slightly different words) - like this:

However when I right-click on a track in Spotify, the "Copy Embed Code" option is missing.

I'm not sure if this is because I don't have a Premium subscription, because of some issue with my browser, or just because Spotify changed their system but didn't update their documents.

Fortunately I've found that there is a Spotify tool you can use to generate the embed code.

How to show a song, album, artist or playlist from Spotify in your blog / website

1   Find the item (song, track, album or artist) that you want to embed

2   Right click on it, and choose Copy <<Whatever>> :Link    (eg   Copy Song Link   or Copy Playlist Link)

3   Go to this webpage (opens it in a new tab or window when you click it):   https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/widgets/spotify-play-button/


4   Scroll down to Get the Code, and paste the copied value into the box

5    Copy the code which is put into the box under step 3.

6    For Blogger, install it into your blog the same way you would install any other HTML code.      For other tools, eg Wordpress.org, follow the usual approach for embedding code

Job done!

You will now have an item from Spotify displaying in your blog.

What exactly it looks like depends on the type of item, and perhaps where you put it.

What this embedded item does  (eg does it play a readder clicks on it) depends on

• Your visitor's status:  Spotify members see the whole thing, free-service members only see a 30-second clip, and
• Where they are viewing it from ie does the country they are accessing the internet from have rights to see the material you shared

Troubleshooting

If you try to embed somehthing, then visitors to your website who are accessing the internet from another country if the "content owner" (ie person who made the album, track, etc that you're embedding) has given permission for this.

If they don't have this permission, you may see a response like the one to the right.

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How to put posts into pages in Wordpress - without using a plug-in

This article shows how to set up your blog made with Wordpress so that that (it looks like) your posts are on separate web-pages, without needing to install any plugin.

(For this task, the answers for Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are so very similar that they have been combined into the one article.)

Wordpress, like most blogging platforms, is basically made up of Posts, Pages and Widgets (aka gadgets).

People who are building blogs often want to "put posts into pages" ie to have a page which shows a subset of their posts, based on the category.  

The standard, but unsatisfactory, answer is

"Sorry, that's not how Wordpress works.   Static pages are used for reference information that doesn't change often, which you don't want to be part of your regular post-feed, but which you do want users to have easy access to."

Luckily it's easy to set up your blog so that it looks like your posts are on different pages by following three simple steps.   This is an out-of-the box function and no plug-in's are required.

Follow these steps to put your posts into pages

1   Add Categories to your posts

Edit each post, and add one or more Categories to it.  

It's your choice whether to add a Category to all posts, or just the ones that you want to show up on specific page-look-alike ones.

2 Make a menu

Skip this step if your blog already has a primary menu.   But if it doesn't:

Wordpress.org users:

• In your Wordpress dashboard, go to Appearance > Menus
• Enter a name for the menu.   fyi, this name isn't displayed, it's just used to help you know which menu is which,  I usually call it   topMenu
• Under Menu settings > Display Location, click   Primary menu
• Click the Save Menu button

Wordpress.com users

• In your Wordpress dashboard, go to  Customize > Menus > Add a menu
• Enter a name for the menu.   fyi, this name isn't displayed, it's just used to help you know which menu is which,  I usually call it   topMenu
• Click Create Menu
• Under Display Location, click   Primary menu
• Click the Save and Publish button

3   Add each Category that you want a page for to the menu

In the Wordpress dashboard:

• Wordpress.org users, choose  Appearance > Menus
• Wordpress.com users, choose Customize > Menus

Choose the menu which you want people to use to a page of posts  (mostly this will be the primary menu - but in theory you could use any one).

Wordpress.com users - you also need to click Add Item here, to open the next screen.

In the screen that opens, there are four types of items that you can add to a menu.   Click on the drop-down arrow beside Categories to see the current list of category values which you have added.

Select the Category-value(s) that you want to have pages for, and click the Add to Menu button.

This will add the selected category values to the "Menu Structure" section.  

Drag-and-drop them up and down the list to change the order of the items on the menu.

When you are happy with the order, click the Save Menu or the Save and Publish button.

3   Optional:  Deal with the home-page

By default, Wordpress blogs show posts on the home page, as well as on the "Category pages" for the categories you have assigned to them.

You can stop this by choosing

• Wordpress.org users:     Appearance > Customize > Static front page   

• Wordpress.com:    Customize  > Static front page   

and clicking the Static Page radio button.


Next, under the Front Page drop-down box, either

• Choose one of your existing Pages or
• Use the Add New link to create a new Page  (you can edit the contents later).

And under Post Page, either

• Choose one of your existing Pages or
• Use the Add New link to create a new Page

Note that this step is optional:   if you do it, you also need to edit your Menu (see step 2 above),  and add the selected Page to your menu.    If  you don't do this, then you need to have set up some other method for people visiting your blog to get to the posts.

Click Save and Publish    (at the top of the sidebar), to make these changes take effect.

Job Done

It really is that simple.  Your readers can now click on the "pages" in your blog from your menu, and see a list of posts for the Page that they chose.

Even better, if some posts relate to more than one topic, they show up on all of the relevant pages.  

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