Plan
Premium
Country
France
Device
Desktop
Operating System
Windows 11
Hi fellow developers and Spotify API team,
I wanted to share a challenging issue I recently debugged with the Spotify Web API, hoping it might help others and provide some feedback.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a professional developer and relied heavily on documentation, retries and Gemini 2.5 Pro to code this script.
The Problem: My Python script, which creates and updates a daily personal playlist with a mix of podcast episodes and tracks, was consistently hitting HTTP 429 "Too Many Requests" errors. The error message often cited "too many 502 error responses" as the underlying reason. This occurred during the POST /v1/playlists/{playlist_id}/tracks (or PUT for clearing/replacing) API call, even when the number of items to add was very small (1-5 items) and the total number of API calls in the entire script execution was minimal (around 10-12 calls), with Spotipy's retries parameter set to 0 and significant pauses between calls.
Debugging Journey: I went through extensive debugging, including:
- Drastically minimizing API calls across all data fetching functions (recent tracks, top tracks, saved tracks, saved shows, show episodes).
- Ensuring only 1-2 calls for the podcast section (fetching 1 show, then its latest episode).
- Implementing long time.sleep() pauses between different stages of API calls and before the playlist update.
- Setting retries=0 on the Spotipy client.
- Using verbose DEBUG logging for Spotipy and urllib3 to trace every HTTP request.
- Isolating functionalities and using cURL for direct API calls.
The Breakthrough: The issue was finally pinpointed to attempting to add audiobook chapters to a playlist. I subscribe to some audiobooks on Spotify, which appear under "Podcasts & Shows". My script would fetch the latest "episode" from these. The show_episodes endpoint returns these audiobook chapters with type: 'chapter' (e.g., "uri": "spotify:episode:XXXXXXXXX", "type": "chapter").
When my script (or a direct cURL call) attempted to add one of these spotify:episode:URIs (that was actually an audiobook chapter) to a playlist using POST /v1/playlists/{playlist_id}/tracks, the API would consistently return a 502 Bad Gateway error with the message {"error": {"status": 502, "message": "Error while loading resource" } }. It seems these 502 errors, even with retries=0 in Spotipy, were contributing to the 429 "Too Many Requests" error when the script tried to update the playlist.
The Workaround: The solution was to modify my script to check the type of the item returned by sp.show_episodes(). If latest_item.get('type') == 'chapter', I now skip this item and do not attempt to add it to the playlist. Since implementing this filter, my script runs perfectly without any 429 or 502 errors, even when fetching multiple "real" podcast episodes and other content.
Feedback & Questions:
- Error Clarity: The initial 429 errors (citing 502s) were quite misleading. It took a lot of effort to discover that the root cause was the type of content being added, specifically audiobook chapters. A more specific error message from the API when trying to add an unsupported or problematic URI type to a playlist would be incredibly helpful. For instance, a 400 Bad Request with a message like "Audiobook chapters cannot be added to playlists via this endpoint" or "URI type 'chapter' not supported for this operation" would have saved a lot of debugging time.
- API Behavior with Audiobooks: Is it intended behaviour that adding spotify:episode:URIs which are type: 'chapter' to playlists via the API results in a 502 error? Or is this a bug? If it's a limitation, clear documentation on this would be beneficial, especially for beginners like me.
I hope sharing this experience helps other developers who might be struggling with similar opaque 502/429 errors when modifying playlists. It also highlights an area where API error reporting or documentation could perhaps be enhanced.
Thanks for the great platform!
Best regards,
Okulvitra
