How to play Spotify music in Discord

Option 1: Listen Along with Spotify

Listen Along comes with Discord's Spotify connection. It isn't a bot, and it doesn't use a voice channel.

1. In Discord, open User Settings, then Connections, and connect your Spotify account.
2. Play something in Spotify. Discord can show what you're listening to on your profile.
3. In a direct message, a group message or a server channel, press the + in the message box to invite people to listen with you.
4. Your friends press Join, and their Spotify follows what you play.

What to know before you pick it:

• Friends who join need Spotify Premium, according to Discord's help page. Without it they get an error.
• Each person hears the music in their own Spotify app, at their own volume.
• Discord's help page also says Spotify stops if you talk with your mic in voice chat for 30 seconds while it plays.

Option 2: a music bot that plays Spotify links

A music bot joins your voice channel and plays there, so nobody needs Spotify Premium, and people listening don't need a Spotify account at all. The steps below use Orpheus, which is free.

1. Add Orpheus to your server. You need Manage Server there.
2. Join a voice channel.
3. In Spotify, use Share on a song, album or playlist to copy its link.
4. In a text channel, type /play and paste the link, like /play query: https://open.spotify.com/track/....

How Orpheus plays a Spotify link

Orpheus doesn't stream audio from Spotify. Spotify tells it what the track is, and Orpheus finds a copy of the same recording it can play:

1. It searches YouTube for the track's ISRC, an ID code for that exact recording, and treats a hit as the recording.
2. Otherwise it searches by title and artist on YouTube, then SoundCloud, and checks the top results for the right title, artist and length.
3. If no copy passes those checks, Orpheus queues nothing and tells you, so you don't get the wrong song.

When that happens, /play with the song name and artist, or /search, sometimes finds a copy Orpheus can check. Spotify links in the docs has the details.

Spotify playlists and albums

• An album or playlist link in /play queues up to 200 tracks.
• /playlist import saves a Spotify playlist to your Orpheus playlists, so you can play it in any server later. Spotify only gives Orpheus the first 200 tracks of a playlist.
• The playlist has to be public. Private and collaborative playlists come back empty.

Which one to use

• Listen Along suits a few friends who all pay for Spotify Premium and want Spotify's own audio in their own apps.
• A music bot suits a server: anyone in the voice channel hears the music, whatever they pay for, and by default anyone there can add songs to the queue.