Spotify oEmbed API stopped working

Question

Until recently, I could query the Spotify oEmbed API for an embed snippet by requesting https://embed.spotify.com/oembed/?url=<track_url>&format=json

Since then, it still works in the browser or via wget , but it does not work anymore programmatically via eg Ruby:

Net::HTTP.get_response(oembed_url)

This now returns a blank string and 200 Status Code (success). What changed? Does it need specific HTTP headers?

Answer 1

It turns out, it requires a User Agent. I guess this is a pretty standard practice but a tiny tweet from @SpotifyPlatform would have been appreciated.

Be careful not to use a nondescript user agent like eg Ruby but rather something specific like the name of your app to avoid running into quota limitations.