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How-To: Create an Apple Music playlist preview widget

Apple Music Playlist Preview Widget

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, Apple makes it easy to create an embeddable playlist preview widget via its Apple Music website. All it takes is the share URL from the playlist of your choice, and the widget generator does the rest of the heavy lifting.

The widget is limited to 30-second previews of all of the songs included in the selected playlist. At the bottom of the widget, you’ll find a link to Apple Music, where playlist listeners who aren’t yet subscribers can sign up for a free 3-month trial subscription.

How to create an embeddable Apple Music playlist widget

Step 1: Copy the share URL of the playlist in iTunes, or via the Music app on an iOS device.

Step 2: Visit the Apple Music playlist preview widget generator, and paste the URL into the input box. The widget should be automatically generated, populating all of the songs from the playlist that appear on Apple Music. It’ll also populate the name of the playlist, its author and a playlist description.

Copy Playlist URL Apple Music

Step 3: Find the embed code beneath the widget to embed the playlist preview in a location of your choosing.

Apple Music Playlist Preview Widget 2

Note: You can also use the Height and Width parameters above the input box on the widget creation page to resize the widget. Songs in the playlist not featured in Apple Music will be omitted.

Here is an example of an Apple Music playlist preview widget that I recently created. Each track plays for 30-seconds. Songs will automatically skip to the next track on desktop browsers. Apple Music subscribers can click the Apple Music logo or the playlist name to load the full playlist in iTunes or the Music app without time restrictions.

The widgets, being previews, aren’t quite as robust as the widgets that Spotify makes available, but this is a good start. The obvious aim of such a preview widget is to convert listeners to trial subscribers, and then convert trial subscribers into paid subscribers after the three month preview window.

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Comments

  1. Would be nice if, as a subscriber, I could open the playlist in iTunes to listen to. But it just takes me to the “New” section.

    • Jeff Benjamin - 8 years ago

      It’s kind of random right now. Some playlists *do* open in Apple Music, others do not, for some reason.

  2. I ended my subscription to Apple Music very recently and I’m not renewing it until either they produce a DECENT set of radio stations (the existing ones are distinctively… Apple-(life)styled) or they VASTLY improve the personal radio stations experience. I won’t weigh in on the former, because there are loads of free and excellent alternatives for that out there.

    I’ll weigh in on the user-created radio stations, however. The current experience can only be characterised as rudimentary. You start a radio station, you can “train” it and when you play it, it jumps to the top of the list. That’s it.
    – first off, allow us to manage them: edit their name, delete unwanted ones. That’s the BARE MINIMUM they should do.
    – allow us to “add” songs to an existing radio station or allow us to start a station from a playlist, rather than a single song only. A very logical feature, given that we already have playlists of stuff related to each other (as a music aficionado and an ex DJ, I have loads of them)

    Then I’d take it even further:
    – when editing a station, allow us to add a short description, add tags to the station and mark it as public / discoverable vs private
    – when we discover another user’s station, do not immediately make a copy of that station to our own user-space (this is what happens now, when we start listening to it). Allow us to either follow it (where we can only listen to and we never train the station) OR copy it to our space and start training it. In the latter case, allow others to know which the source station was, for proper accreditation
    – introduce a rating system (like/ok/dislike?) and modify the search algorithm to include ratings and number of followers
    This could create almost a “social network” of music aficionados with their radio stations and followers

    Last but not least, the algorithm that recommends tracks for the radio stations sucks when trying to train it for some scenarios. I just quit trying to train it for 80s and italo-disco. I kept receiving recommendations for arabic/hindi music and other totally unrelated music

  3. Kyle Bavender - 8 years ago

    Thanks for the info, Jeff. By the way, love ASTR.

    Would be nice if this was built right in to iTunes — I seem to recall a “copy embed code” option in Spotify’s context menu. My biggest request, though, is collaborative playlists.

  4. arthurtoogood - 8 years ago

    its not working on wordpress… any ideas as to why or how to fix? Thanks!

Author

Avatar for Jeff Benjamin Jeff Benjamin

Jeff is the head of video content production for 9to5. He initially joined 9to5Mac in 2016, producing videos, walkthroughs, how-tos, written tutorials, and reviews. He takes pride in explaining things simply, clearly, and concisely. Jeff’s videos have been watched hundreds of millions of times by people seeking to learn more about today’s tech. Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube to catch Jeff’s latest videos.