topic Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists in Spotify for Developers

Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

sushitime — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 23:05:40 GMT

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Device

Windows Desktop Computer

My Question or Issue

Hi,

I'm using the Spotify developer web API, but I'm unable to find a way to retrieve the discover weekly and release radar playlists. I've tried using the console to "get current user playlists" by setting the limit to 50 and offset to 0, enabled all scopes for the auth token but didn't get any of the two playlists:
https://developer.spotify.com/console/get-current-user-playlists/
I have 38 private playlists pop-up total, so I know it isn't a limit issue.

I've took a short look around the other requests, but none of them seem to give me what I want (but maybe I'm speaking too soon on this one).

Please help and thank you in advance.

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

spotifyjosh — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 13:03:29 GMT

Hi @sushitime, welcome to the forum. It's possible to find those playlists using our Search API. Keep in mind that to do this, you'll need to use an access token obtained through one of the user authorization flows (like the authorization code flow).

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

sushitime — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:31:17 GMT

Awesome, thank you!

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

AverageUnknown — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 22:39:33 GMT

I tried to query the Search endpoint with q="Release+Radar"&type=playlist and I'm getting a bunch of extra results from user playlists, when all I want is the Spotify-curated list. Am I missing something that would help filter that list down to the one I'm looking for?

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

ogostos — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 07:25:45 GMT

Have you tried to get playlist by its spotify id? Seems it doesn't change.

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

levvvski — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 02:33:00 GMT

Any update on this?

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

tintin10q — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 21:46:50 GMT

There should really be a filter to only get spotify generated playlist

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

lukens — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 12:09:00 GMT

When I try getting the playlist by id it has no items in it. Same with Discover Weekly.

I think I’m using the correct ids, because the playlist name is correct in the response. I got it from the share url.

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

Ximzend — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:40:31 GMT

Hi @lukens

Since November 27, 2024, apps that had no quota extension before that date, are not able to get algorithmic and Spotify-owned editorial playlists. You can read more about this change on this page.

Edit: I earlier said "newly created apps", but this is wrong. Even existing apps without a extension cannot use those APIs anymore.

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

lukens — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:44:15 GMT

Ah, ok, that’s disappointing. Though, in my use case I can work around it with the small manual step of adding it to my own playlist first.

I did also chuckle at “We’re excited about the continued engagement we’re seeing to learn, experiment, innovate, and deliver unique experiences with Spotify”, it seems that sentiment didn’t last long, given the recent changes to extension approval, which will sadly shut off the majority of developers from ever being able to deliver a unique experience with Spotify (as they first need to deliver it to 25K monthly users without Spotify).

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

Sc0rpagion — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 17:48:51 GMT

@lukens Not even 25K, 250K. The stifling of innovation is inevitable once a private commercial entity fulfil such an important role as access to art. Spotify became the de facto way to consume music in the last few years, their monopoly on access to music is unquestionable, so now their terms about the consumption of music have essentially become society's terms about the consumption of music.

Twenty years ago there were two options, libraries, and purchasing music. The latter was accessible to the economically advantaged and the former was a lifeline for the rest. In that context, both provide a lot less access to a variety of music than we have now, but at least there was an equaliser between the two lesser extremes. Now through lobbying, defunding and a general disdain for public ownership, we've created one extreme, a monopoly, and the owner of that monopoly is not conscientious of the power they've inherited.

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

mci — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:42:55 GMT

This is terrible. I deliberately wrote a Spotify command line client so I could pull Discover Weekly to the radio I built on a Raspberry Pi and use it as an alarm clock. And now all my work has gone to waste. Shame on you, Spotify.

Re: Spotify API: retrieve Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists

mci — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:03:21 GMT

Well, there was also the "torrent" option. Spotify is pushing me back toward torrents, downloading a huge MP3 library, and writing my own recommendation algorithm.