Spotify

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Spotify is a digital music streaming service that provides a proprietary Linux client.

Installation

USE flags

USE flags for media-sound/spotify Spotify is a social music platform

libnotify	Enable desktop notification support
local-playback	Allows playing local files with the Spotify client
pax-kernel	Triggers a paxmarking of the main Spotify binary
pulseaudio	Controls the dependency on pulseaudio or apulse

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2025-07-06 19:56 More information about USE flags

Emerge

Install Spotify:

root #emerge --ask media-sound/spotify

Note
Please ensure that net-misc/curl is built with the bfd linker (default) instead of the gold linker. See bug #651770 for more information.

Control via MPRIS

MPRISis a D-Bus interface which provides a common API to control media players.

Spotify supports MPRIS.

Prequisites if using a window manager

In $HOME/.xinitrc, make the window manager start with dbus-run-session.

Otherwise, Spotify won't provide an MPRIS interface.

FILE $HOME/.xinitrcStarting bspwm with D-Bus

exec dbus-run-session bspwm

With dbus-send

The most simple approach to controlling Spotify is using dbus-send.

Play/pause:

user $dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause

Next:

user $dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next

Previous:

user $dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Previous

With playerctl

Install media-sound/playerctl.

Play/pause:

user $playerctl play-pause

Next:

user $playerctl next

Previous:

user $playerctl previous

More info about playerctl can be found on its GitHub page.

Starting with Wayland

Spotify uses Xorg by default. In order to make Spotify start with Wayland, you can add

--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

to Spotify's .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop on the

Exec=spotify

line. It should look like this:

FILE /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktopStarting Spotify with Wayland

Exec=spotify --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland %U

You can also add these options to anything that launches Spotify through the command line.

External Resources

• Arch Linux Wiki - Spotify