How to get your Spotify extended streaming history
On Spotify's privacy page you'll see a data download section with tick-boxes. The default, Account data, includes a file called "StreamingHistory" that sounds like exactly what you want, but it only covers roughly the last year of listening, in a simplified format. The one you actually want is Extended streaming history: your complete play-by-play record going back to the day you joined Spotify, with millisecond play durations, exact UTC timestamps, and album names for every track.
Requesting it
- Go to spotify.com/account/privacy and sign in.
- Scroll to Download your data.
- Tick Extended streaming history. (You can untick Account data, it isn't needed for stats.)
- Click Request data, then confirm via the email Spotify sends you. The request isn't queued until you click that confirmation link.
- Wait. Spotify says up to 30 days for the extended history; in practice it usually lands within one to two weeks. You'll get an email with a download link when it's ready, and the link stays valid for a limited time, download it promptly.
What's in the download
You'll get a zip called something like my_spotify_data.zip.
Inside is a folder of JSON files named
Streaming_History_Audio_2016-2018_0.json,
Streaming_History_Audio_2018-2020_1.json and so on, your history
split into chunks, plus a video-history file if you've watched anything.
Each entry in the audio files records the track, artist and album name, a
timestamp of when playback ended, how many milliseconds actually played, and
housekeeping like whether the track was skipped or played offline.
Podcast episodes live in the same files with their own fields. They aren't music plays, so Stick filters them out during import, as well as any play under 30 seconds, so a two-second skip doesn't pollute your play counts.
Importing it into Stick
On the Import page, select the JSON files from the export, you can import them one at a time, in any order. Stick detects the Spotify format automatically. Files are handled up to 200 MB at a go, which comfortably covers even a decade of heavy listening, and the duplicate scan means importing the same file twice (or overlapping exports from different years) adds nothing twice.
Already have some of the same listens from Last.fm? Stick notices when a Spotify play and a Last.fm scrobble are the same listen recorded twice and keeps just one, preferring Spotify's native timestamp, see how duplicates are handled across services.
A note on freshness
Like any export, the extended history is a snapshot: it ends the day Spotify generated it. You can re-request a fresh export every few months and re-import just the newest file, the duplicate scan makes that painless, only the new plays go in.
What the import gets you
Because the extended history carries exact timestamps and albums, it powers everything Stick computes: top artists, albums and tracks over any time window, listening streaks, the day-by-hour listening clock, and plays-by-year charts that go back as far as your account does. Every track is then matched against MusicBrainz in the background, which is how album art and genres fill themselves in without you lifting a finger.