Backup Your Spotify Liked Songs to a new Playlist with Python

Spotify’s Liked Songs collection has an annoying limitation: it isn’t a real playlist. You can’t share it, you can’t reorder it into something public, and there’s no one-click export. If your account ever gets locked or you migrate to another service, those years of curation are stuck. Personally, I hated that for so long. But lately, I asked AI if it can help.

In this post, we’ll walk through a small Python script generated by AI (Claude Code) that copies every liked song into a normal playlist — in my case, 1,129 tracks in under a minute — and the undocumented Spotify API restriction that almost derailed it.

Why bother? A few use cases

• Backup / insurance — playlists survive in shared links and can be re-followed; Liked Songs cannot.
• Sharing — turn your entire taste profile into a link you can send to friends.
• Migration — playlist-transfer tools (TuneMyMusic, Soundiiz, etc.) work far better with playlists than with your library.
• Snapshots — run it once a year and you get dated snapshots of your music taste over time.
• Smart playlist source — a real playlist can be fed into other tools, sorted, deduplicated, or split by genre.

Prerequisites

1. Python 3.8+ installed
2. Two libraries: spotipy (the de-facto Spotify Web API client) and tqdm (progress bar)
3. A free Spotify Developer app for API credentials

pip install spotipy tqdm

pip install spotipy tqdm

Step 1: Create a Spotify app

Head to the Spotify Developer Dashboard, log in with your normal Spotify account, and click Create app. Two things matter:

• Set the Redirect URI to http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback — the script spins up a tiny local server on that port to catch the OAuth callback.
• Copy the Client ID and Client Secret from the app’s settings page.

Step 2: The script

Save this as spotify_liked_songs_duplicator.py and drop in your own Client ID and Secret:

import spotipy
from spotipy.oauth2 import SpotifyOAuth
from tqdm import tqdm

CLIENT_ID = "YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
CLIENT_SECRET = "YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET"
REDIRECT_URI = "http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback"

SCOPE = (
    "user-library-read "
    "playlist-modify-private "
    "playlist-modify-public"
)

sp = spotipy.Spotify(
    auth_manager=SpotifyOAuth(
        client_id=CLIENT_ID,
        client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET,
        redirect_uri=REDIRECT_URI,
        scope=SCOPE,
        open_browser=True,
        cache_path=".spotify_cache"
    )
)

print("Logged in as:", sp.current_user()["display_name"])

# POST /users/{id}/playlists returns 403 for dev-mode apps; /me/playlists works
playlist = sp._post(
    "me/playlists",
    payload={
        "name": "Liked Songs Backup",
        "public": False,
        "description": "Backup of all my liked songs",
    },
)

playlist_id = playlist["id"]
print("Created playlist:", playlist["external_urls"]["spotify"])

tracks = []
offset = 0

while True:
    results = sp.current_user_saved_tracks(limit=50, offset=offset)

    if not results["items"]:
        break

    tracks.extend(
        item["track"]["uri"]
        for item in results["items"]
        if item["track"] is not None
    )

    offset += 50

print(f"Found {len(tracks)} liked songs")

for i in tqdm(range(0, len(tracks), 100)):
    sp.playlist_add_items(
        playlist_id,
        tracks[i:i+100]
    )

print("Backup completed successfully!")

import spotipy
from spotipy.oauth2 import SpotifyOAuth
from tqdm import tqdm

CLIENT_ID = "YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
CLIENT_SECRET = "YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET"
REDIRECT_URI = "http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback"

SCOPE = (
    "user-library-read "
    "playlist-modify-private "
    "playlist-modify-public"
)

sp = spotipy.Spotify(
    auth_manager=SpotifyOAuth(
        client_id=CLIENT_ID,
        client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET,
        redirect_uri=REDIRECT_URI,
        scope=SCOPE,
        open_browser=True,
        cache_path=".spotify_cache"
    )
)

print("Logged in as:", sp.current_user()["display_name"])

# POST /users/{id}/playlists returns 403 for dev-mode apps; /me/playlists works
playlist = sp._post(
    "me/playlists",
    payload={
        "name": "Liked Songs Backup",
        "public": False,
        "description": "Backup of all my liked songs",
    },
)

playlist_id = playlist["id"]
print("Created playlist:", playlist["external_urls"]["spotify"])

tracks = []
offset = 0

while True:
    results = sp.current_user_saved_tracks(limit=50, offset=offset)

    if not results["items"]:
        break

    tracks.extend(
        item["track"]["uri"]
        for item in results["items"]
        if item["track"] is not None
    )

    offset += 50

print(f"Found {len(tracks)} liked songs")

for i in tqdm(range(0, len(tracks), 100)):
    sp.playlist_add_items(
        playlist_id,
        tracks[i:i+100]
    )

print("Backup completed successfully!")

The flow is simple: authenticate via OAuth, create a private playlist, page through your library 50 tracks at a time (the API maximum), then add them to the playlist in batches of 100 (also the API maximum).

Step 3: Run it

python spotify_liked_songs_duplicator.py

python spotify_liked_songs_duplicator.py

On first run a browser window opens asking you to authorize the app. After that, the token is cached in .spotify_cache and subsequent runs are fully non-interactive. Expected output:

Logged in as: imtrinity94
Created playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/...
Found 1129 liked songs
100%|██████████| 12/12 [00:08<00:00]
Backup completed successfully!

Logged in as: imtrinity94
Created playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/...
Found 1129 liked songs
100%|██████████| 12/12 [00:08<00:00]
Backup completed successfully!

Note

Re-running the script creates a new playlist each time — handy for snapshots, but delete the old one first if you just want a single backup or you can put a datetime stamp in your playlist name in the script.

Also, I know there are several tools out there, even some UI hacks but I prefer this code based approach. That’s all!