Spotify Curator & Playlist Owner Profiler

Find out who is curating a niche on Spotify, how much reach they have, and what their taste actually looks like — the artists they favour, how underground their picks are, how current their catalogue is, and whether they are still active.

Built for artist teams pitching for playlist placement, for brands profiling music influencers, and for market researchers mapping a scene.

No Spotify account, no API key, no browser.

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What you get per curator

Field	Notes
ownerName, ownerId, ownerUrl, ownerAvatar	Who they are and where to find them
totalFollowers	Reach summed across their playlists found
playlistsFound, biggestPlaylistName, totalTracksCurated	Scale of what they run
topArtistNames, topArtists, distinctArtists	Who they actually play
undergroundScore	0–1 from median play count — discovery curator or hits curator
medianPlaycount, maxPlaycount	The raw numbers behind it
medianReleaseYear, catalogueSpreadYears	New-music curator vs retrospective
explicitShare	Whether the playlist is brand-safe
lastUpdated	Still active, or abandoned two years ago

Plus one PLAYLIST row per playlist — including its description, which is where curators usually put their submission instructions and contact email.

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Quick start

{
  "keywords": ["indie folk", "lofi study", "afrobeats 2026"],
  "minFollowers": 5000,
  "trackSampleSize": 50,
  "exportFormats": ["csv"]
}

Real output from a two-keyword run:

Lofi Girl          1 playlist   616,480 followers   underground 0.77   median yr 2021
mixstarrs          1 playlist   393,618 followers   underground 0.00   median yr 2020
Etymology Lofi     1 playlist   187,712 followers   underground 0.99   median yr 2022

Three curators in the same niche with completely different pitching profiles.

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Read this before you rely on it

Spotify has closed off user profiles to anonymous clients. Its profile service answers 403 RBAC: access denied even with a valid client-token, and a user page renders nothing but a display name without a login. So there is no way to list a given user's public playlists, or who they follow — that door is shut, and any tool claiming otherwise is either logged in as someone or guessing.

This actor works the other way round: it finds the playlists, which are fully public and name their owner in full, and builds the curator profile from those. That means:

• playlistsFound is what this run discovered, not the curator's complete catalogue. More keywords find more of their work.
• A curator only appears if at least one of their playlists surfaced in search.

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Coverage comes from keywords, not page size

Spotify's search returns at most 30 mixed-type results per query — tracks, artists, playlists and podcasts together, typically 15–20 playlists — and it ignores every paging parameter. Asking for more is not an error; it simply changes nothing.

So breadth comes from running more, narrower keywords: "indie folk", "indie folk 2026", "folk acoustic chill" will between them surface far more curators than any single query can. Results are also geo-biased by exit IP, so set the proxy country to the market you care about when profiling a local scene.

includeEditorialPlaylists is off by default because Spotify's own account owns the biggest playlist in nearly every niche, and leaving it in makes "Spotify" top every ranking — true, but useless when you are looking for independent curators to approach.

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Cost

One request per keyword, plus one request per playlist — which returns the follower count and the track sample together, so taste profiling is free. Two keywords yielding 13 playlists is 16 requests.

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Limits worth knowing

• Follower counts are per playlist, not per curator. Spotify publishes no profile-level follower number to anonymous clients, so totalFollowers is a sum across playlists found and one person following two of their playlists is counted twice.
• undergroundScore is derived, not a Spotify field. It is a transform of the median play count and is meant for comparing curators against each other, not as an absolute rating.
• Playlists can hold podcast episodes and local files. Those are skipped in the taste sample rather than counted as tracks.
• A playlist that has been deleted or made private produces an ERROR row; Spotify does not distinguish the two from outside.

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Output

Every run writes to the Apify dataset, with curators sorted by reach. Set exportFormats to also drop a ready-made spotify-curators.csv, .xlsx, .json or .ndjson into the run's key-value store.

See CRAWLING_METHOD.md for how the data is obtained.