How to Install Spotify on Arch Linux

If you love to listen to music while using your Arch Linux system, you may want to use Spotify to play your favorite albums or playlists. Luckily, the official Spotify client, is also available for Linux based operative systems so, let’s see how to install it on Arch Linux.

How to Install Spotify

Unfortunately, the Spotify client is not officially available in the Arch Linux repos. Anyway, it’s really easy to install using AUR, the Arch User Repository, one of the best things of Arch Linux.

If you don’t know how to use the Arch User Repository, you can check this article: How to Install AUR Packages on Arch Linux with YAY.

Once you have installed YAY (or your preferred AUR helper), you are ready to run this command:

$ yay -Sy spotify

In a few seconds, you will be able to run Spotify on your system!

Unofficial Spotify Clients

As we all know, GNU/Linux is plenty of useful and interesting alternatives for every kind of software and Spotify is no exception! For this reason there are a lot of Spotify alternatives:

• Clementine – Able to stream from Spotify after activating (downloading) a plugin in the settings.
• Librespot – An open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify’s service (streaming), without using the official closed-source libspotify.
• MellowPlayer – A free, open source and cross-platform desktop application that runs web-based music streaming services in its own window and provides integration with your desktop. No longer actively developed.
• Mopidy – An alternative plug-in based implementation of Music Player Daemon is able to stream from Spotify with an extension.
• ncspot – Cross-platform ncurses Spotify client written in Rust, inspired by ncmpc and the likes.
• Psst – Fast and multi-platform Spotify client, made in Rust with a native GUI.
• Spot -Gtk/Rust native Spotify client for the Gnome desktop.
• Spotifyd – An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients.
• spotify-tui – A Spotify client for the terminal written in Rust.
• spotify-qt – Lightweight Spotify client using Qt written in C++.
• Tizonia – Command-line cloud music player for Linux with support for Spotify, Google Play Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, Plex servers and Chromecast devices.

For more informations about the Spotify third party clients, take a look here.

Muting the Ads

In Linux, there are different ways to mute the annoying ads:

• spotblock is a resource-efficient ad blocker that runs as a systemd daemon.
• Spotify-AdKiller is another alternative to block Spotify ads.
• spotblock-rs is a fast and light program to mute Spotify ads. It also works with PipeWire.

Go to this page to read more about this topic.

Final Words

Spotify is a great way to listen to music and podcasts and it’s official client for Linux works pretty well. Moreover, it’s greatly customizable. You can check this page in order to customize your user experience and tune your Spotify client.