Spotify Web API: Get Playlist Items formats Podcast Episodes incorrectly

[benfry128]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

When I use the Get Playlist Items route on a playlist that contains Podcast episodes, the artist attributes are incorrectly formatted. 

In particular, the 'name' attribute appears to always be 'None' and the 'type' attribute houses the actual name of the artist. 

Additionally, the 'track'['episode'] and 'track'['track'] attributes are incorrect for podcast episodes. Like a normal track, episodes seem to always have 'episode' = false and 'track' = true. In fact, why do these even exist when 'type' = 'episode' or 'track' seems to work just fine?

The attached screenshots show the relevant portions of the results of a call to this route, which gets the items from a playlist which contains a single podcast episode

https://api.spotify.com/v1/playlists/2Rj2H0cwj7kVAuPgYvx1OO/tracks

 These problems aren't major issues, they're just annoying inaccuracies in the API.

[LambertSpot · Accepted solution]

It is due to backwards compatibility. When episode was introduced it was mapped to the track type to make it available in all existing integrations without needing client updates. To not have this done, you need to specify the `additional_types` query parameter.

So you might want to try:

https://api.spotify.com/v1/playlists/2Rj2H0cwj7kVAuPgYvx1OO/tracks?additional_types=track,episode