Spotify API x ADDCG
Automated Data Driven Content Generation with Spotify API
The challenge
To create the fastest and most efficient way of creating videos with available data, with minimal or no user intervention.
The idea
Spotify is the most widely used music streaming app, and it also offers an API for accessing its data.
As a creative technologist, I wanted to develop a workflow so that we could leverage New Releases data fetched from this API, feed the data to After Effects, and automate the video creation process.
Timeline
1 week.
Role | Steps taken
UI, Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects Expressions, Javascript.
Project Goals
• Learn javascript and Spotify API.
• Extract data from Spotify's API and format it into JSON. I targeted Spotify New Releases in this study.
• Create an After Effects Template with responsive design.
• Integrate data to After Effects.
• Automate the render process. This means After Effects don't need to be launched, and anyone in the team can now produce videos with a single script execution.
Ideation | Design Mock
Since my focus for this project lies in ADDCG, I wanted the UI to be as simple as possible while still adhering to Spotify’s Brand Guidelines.
After Effects Templatization
As not all album art are created equal. I would need certain automation or expressions to be in place for logos, fonts, graphics to be able to switch from light to dark on different album art colors.
First Video Preview - After Effects Render
Since I needed a video opener, I decided to add more elements to the background of the video which could be used for a seamless transition from the opener to the main part of the video.
Tool in motion - Javascript
Script Features:
• Automatically search for Spotify New Release every minute. This can be changed to fit the criteria.
• Automatically search for Spotify New Release based on Artists every minute.
With backend code in place, with a line of code executed, Spotify data is being fetched every minute. With this data, new videos are then generated automatically without even launching After Effects.
Automated Generated Videos
Here are the videos generated without any user intervention, without the need to launch After Effects.
Reflection
This project was set out to be an automatic new release preview video generation tool. However, Spotify API does not allow for downloads of songs or song previews into a file. Due to this API limitation, I could not complete this project by adding a snippet of the New Release's audio into the rendered video. However, this is a great proof of concept and I am going to test out what can be done with other music APIs.
Next Steps
Launching of videos in different social media or channels can be an automated process too. So I intent to finish this part of the script to truly automate the process from data fetching, integrating data to After Effects, rendering video to launch.
Incorporate OpenAI into this. Especially so to test out on how effective it would be to autogenerate copies / captions for social launches.