Spotify API Not Returning All Public Playlists Owned by Spotify

[sdsanguesa]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

For a small project I was working on, I wanted to look through Spotify's provided playlists. Using the user playlists API call, I was able to retrieve about 1400 playlists. However, looking at the playlists I was subscribed to, there were at least 2 missing from the list retrieved from the API call.

The playlists:

Canzoni Tristi

37i9dQZF1DX0eXqYHdgDwI

Viejitos pero Bonitas

37i9dQZF1DX05XOaKL5GVe

I verified that the two playlists were available in the web and desktop app (which I presume means they are available in the US market). I also verified that I was using 'spotify' as the user id. Both playlists seem to have the tag `public:None` but that also appears to be the case for all Spotify owned playlists, most of which show up from the API call.

There are two relevant issues that have been posted to the old Github repo: here and here. The latter of the two seems to be the most relevant and was closed as being a temporary issue. I will check again in a week or so to see if these two playlists appear when queried. I wanted to open this issue here as it's been 4 years since that issue was closed on Github. If this is just something we have to live with, that's fine; I just wanted to make sure this was documented.

I should also note that it took very little tries to find playlists that were not included in the returned playlists. I'm fairly certain I could find many more.

[E8Wq · Accepted solution]

I am using https://everynoise.com/worldbrowser.cgi as a reference list of Spotify-owned playlists and it includes playlists not returned by GET /users/spotify/playlists.

My plan is to call GET /browse/categories, then for each of those, call GET /browse/categories/{category}/playlists. I expect to get the same results as Spotify World Browser.

I still don't know if that will give me a complete list, but it would be an improvement 🤷

[sdsanguesa]

Thanks so much for responding. This seems to have cleared up a lot of my confusion. I found both the playlists I was looking for, but not in the USA market! I was under the impression that the Spotify App would only show results for the registered market, but that is clearly not the case. I don't know if this is why you've been unable to find some playlists via GET /users/spotify/playlists, but this seems to be the case for my issue.

I'll mark this issue as solved for now, though I may open a feature request to allow querying owned playlists in other markets!