About

About spotmp3

I’m one person. spotmp3 is the thing I built to turn a Spotify link into MP3 files I could keep. It has nothing to do with Spotify AB and never has. This page is the long version: how it works, what it can’t do, and who pays for it.

What it is

One page, one server. You paste a link — a track, an album, a playlist, an artist. The server reads what Spotify publishes about it, goes and finds the audio, writes the tags and the cover into each file, and your browser saves them. There’s no account, no app, no extension, and nowhere on this site that asks for a password. A public link doesn’t need a login to read, so I don’t ask you for one.

I built it for my own library and never really changed the shape. That’s why there’s nothing to browse: no ratings, no comments, no recommendations, no catalogue. Nothing is published here. Every file gets made when somebody asks for it, and then it expires.

Where the audio comes from

Nothing here decrypts or copies Spotify’s own audio stream. No tool on the open web can. That stream is encrypted and tied to an account, and a site telling you otherwise is describing something it isn’t doing.

What happens instead is a match. Your link identifies a recording: its title, its artists, its exact duration, its release, its cover art, all read from the page Spotify publishes for embedding. The server then goes looking for that same recording in public sources, checks every candidate against the duration and the names before it accepts one, and encodes what it accepts to a 320 kbps MP3 with the tags and the 640×640 cover written in.

Two things follow from that, and you should know both before you use it. The file is a re-encode: 320 kbps is as good as this pipeline gets, and nothing can put back detail the source never had. And the match can miss — an obscure remix, a regional exclusive, a recording nobody has ever uploaded anywhere public. When it misses, the row tells you why instead of quietly vanishing, and if the matcher threw out candidates along the way it shows them to you so you can pick one yourself.

What it won’t do, on purpose

• No accounts. There’s nothing to sign up for, so there’s no database of you here either.
• No installer, ever. If any page claiming to be this site offers you an .exe, an .apk or a “download helper”, it is not this site. Sideloaded downloader apps are the most common source of malware in this category, and that includes any that might one day carry this name.
• No Spotify stream ripping. The dedicated podcast downloader identifies a show from its Spotify link, then downloads only the original files its publisher exposed in a public RSS feed.
• No library, no pages for recordings. Nothing here is indexed, listed or linkable, which is why a takedown request reaches cached files and not a page.

Who pays for it

Mostly me. Sometimes the people who chip in. There are no ads here, no affiliate links, and nothing gets a paid mention. The one thing you can buy is an unlock: send a whole playlist in a single pass, get it back as one ZIP, and stop counting against the daily figure — for thirty days, or for good. One payment, no subscription, no account, and the MP3 is the same file either way — you’re paying for how it arrives, not for a better version of it.

The only thing I measure here is page views, using software on this same server instead of somebody else’s. No ad network loads here, so no ad network is watching you here. What gets stored, and for how long, is in the privacy policy, line by line.

Both paid limits are about volume, because volume is the only part of this that costs real money. The audio leaves over a connection billed by the gigabyte, and a batch spends that faster than anything else the site does. So the free path is three tracks a press and a daily allowance: above what an evening of picking songs gets to, below what a script can drain a server with. Paying lifts both.

Where the line is drawn

A tool like this can be used lawfully or unlawfully, and a website is not the thing that gets to decide which. So I’ll just say where I stand. No music library is published here. It’s for personal use, where your local law allows it. Rights holders get a real address and a written process, and those are the copyright policy, the takedown policy and the terms of service.

If something here is wrong

Every number on this site is supposed to match what the software does. Where I find a claim I can’t back, I take it out instead of softening it. If you find one that’s still wrong — a limit that doesn’t match, a file that came out different from what a page promised — write to support@spotmp3.net. I read it. The contact page says what to include so the first reply can be a useful one.