WebAPI and the SimplifiedAlbumObject

slieb17 — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 18:39:04 GMT

I'm seeing a few inconsistencies that I was hoping SPOTIFY could help with:

#1 - Up until yesterday, when retrieving albums via the /artists/{id}/albums request, the albums being returned included external_ids, copyrights, [record] label, and popularity. As of today, that seems to have changed, and now I'm seeing album objects that are missing those fields. What changed?

#2 - When attempting to retrieve an artist id and their corresponding albums, I would typically do a /search with parameter type = artist, get a series of artist_ids, and then for each, issue the /artists/{id}/albums request. However, I am now encountering 429 errors on the albums request with this approach. As an alternative, I've opted to expand the /search request and change the 'type' parameter to 'artist,album' which returns a payload of both artists AND albums. This seems to work without causing a 429 -- why? My only issue with this path is that the album objects fail to include the aforementioned fields -- copyrights, external_ids, label, and popularity.

#3 - The /artists/{id}/albums request allows me to limit the returning payload with the 'include_groups' parameter, thereby enabling me to ignore singles or compilations (for example). Is there a way to extend this server-side filtering to the basic /search query? It would go a long way toward minimizing the size of returning payloads.

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WebAPI and the SimplifiedAlbumObject