a hack club ysws · you ship, we ship
Rewrite Spotify. Get paid in Spotify.
The Spotify desktop app is a website in a trenchcoat. Spicetify lets you pry it open and load your own CSS and JavaScript into it — themes, extensions, whole custom pages. Build something. Log the hours. Trade them for listening time.
Free. Run by Hack Club. Not affiliated with Spotify — we just really like taking their app apart.
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01 the tool
Your music player is a
website wearing a trenchcoat.
Spotify's desktop client isn't some sealed native binary. It's HTML, CSS and JavaScript — the exact same stuff a webpage is made of — just shipped in a box with the lid glued shut.
Spicetify is an open-source command-line tool that unglues the lid. It patches the client so your stylesheet and your script load right next to Spotify's, every single time you hit play. No browser extension. No sketchy mod. Just your code, inside the app you already use every day.
If you can style a <div>, you can restyle Spotify.
$ spicetify config current_theme mine
$ spicetify apply
✔ your css is now spotify's css
$ # regret it?
$ spicetify restore
✔ nothing was harmedone command puts it all back →
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.css
Themes
A stylesheet plus a colour palette. Repaint every pixel — corners, fonts, spacing, the lot.
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.js
Extensions
A script with full access to the player. React to track changes, add buttons, automate things.
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/app
Custom apps
An entire page of your own, living in the sidebar next to Home and Search. Yes, really.
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~snip
Snippets
Three lines of CSS that fix the one thing that's annoyed you for four years. Counts too.
02 the brief
Make Spotify do something
it was never asked to do.
Useful, ugly, beautiful, unhinged — all four are valid. Some starting points:
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theme
Make it look like something else entirely
Windows 98. A Game Boy. A newspaper. A terminal. A ransom note. Your bedroom wall.
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extension
Automate the thing you keep doing manually
Auto-skip anything under 90 seconds. Ban a specific song forever. Save every track you replay twice.
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custom app
Add a page Spotify refuses to build
Your listening stats, offline and private. A tag system. A "songs I liked in 2019" archaeology tool.
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chaos
Build something with no business existing
Lyrics that fall like Tetris pieces. Album art that melts. A UI that gets progressively more cursed the longer you listen.
also totally fine:
03 stuck?
The Idea Jukebox
Press the button. Take what it gives you. Ignore it and build something better.
A theme that slowly loses saturation the longer you stay on one album.
theme04 the deal
Your hours have an
exchange rate.
Every 2 hours you spend building becomes 1 month of Spotify Premium. There's no single tier to pick — it just keeps adding up. Drag the playhead.
Use the arrow keys, or drag it. Hours are counted with Hackatime while you code.
…and 24 hours isn't the ceiling. it just ran out of room on the page.
05 the run of show
Six tracks, then you're
listening for free.
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01
0:02
Say hi in #hackify
On the Hack Club Slack. Lurk, ask, steal ideas, post screenshots of things that are broken.
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02
0:09
Install Spicetify
One command on Windows, macOS or Linux. Then
spicetify applyand your Spotify is officially yours. -
03
0:04
Start the clock
Hook up Hackatime in your editor. It counts your hours in the background so you don't have to remember to.
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04
2:00+
Build the thing
Theme, extension, custom app, or a pile of snippets that add up to something. Weird is welcome. Broken-but-interesting is welcome. This is the part that takes hours — which is exactly the point.
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05
0:15
Ship it
Put the code somewhere public with a screenshot and instructions, so the next person can actually install it.
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06
∞
Get your months
1 month of Spotify Premium for every 2 hours you put in. Then go back to track 04 and stack more.
the loop is the whole point
06 liner notes
Questions you were
about to ask.
I've never touched Spicetify. Am I cooked?
No. If you've ever written CSS, you can make a decent theme in an afternoon — you're editing a stylesheet, that's it. The docs are genuinely good, and #hackify is full of people who were also confused about 40 minutes ago.
Do I need Premium already to build this?
Nope. Spicetify runs on the free Spotify desktop client. Building your thing costs you nothing but time — and time is the currency here.
Does it really stack, or is there a secret cap?
It really stacks. 2 hours is 1 month. 10 hours is 5 months. 30 hours is 15 months. The maths does not get more complicated than dividing by two.
What actually counts as a Hackify project?
Anything that changes Spotify through Spicetify: a theme, an extension, a custom app, or a set of snippets that together do something real. If you're squinting at your idea wondering whether it counts, post it in #hackify and someone will tell you it does.
Am I going to permanently destroy my Spotify?
spicetify restore. That's the whole answer. It puts the client back exactly how it was, and you can re-apply whenever you want. Break things freely.
Windows, Mac, or Linux?
All three. Spicetify supports the desktop client on every one of them. (The Microsoft Store build of Spotify is the one that sulks — grab the installer from spotify.com instead.)
Is Spotify running this?
No. Hackify is a Hack Club YSWS. Spicetify is an independent open-source project made by the community. Spotify has nothing to do with either of us — we're just extremely fond of their app's DOM.
What's a YSWS? What's Hack Club?
YSWS stands for You Ship, We Ship: you make something real and send it in, we send something real back. Hack Club is a nonprofit and a network of 100,000+ teenage hackers who learn by building things that mostly work.
open spotify. it's about to look different.
Go break
your music player.
2 hours in the editor 1 month in your ears. Repeat as desired.