Free Spotify Playlist Intelligence — Tracklist, Followers & Editorial Flag Scraper

Scrape any public Spotify playlist for full track list, follower count, owner info, editorial flag, and run-over-run diffs (added / removed / moved tracks). Built for Spotify playlist tracking, editorial playlist monitoring, and playlist follower count intelligence. $0.01 per playlist.

What you get

• Playlist metadata: name, description, image_url, total_tracks, uri
• followers — exact follower count (e.g. 33,847,291 for Today's Top Hits). The official Spotify Web API does still expose this, but only with OAuth.
• is_editorial — boolean flag, true when the owner is spotify itself (i.e. it's an official Spotify-curated editorial playlist like RapCaviar, Today's Top Hits, mint)
• owner — uri, name, username
• tracks[] — full paginated tracklist with position, name, artists[], album.name, album.cover_url, duration_ms, explicit, added_at, added_by, playcount per track, track_number, disc_number
• Podcast episodes are also surfaced (when a playlist mixes music + episodes) with podcast_uri and podcast_name
• diff block — when trackDiffs is on, every run after the first emits added, removed, moved, unchanged counts plus per-track detail vs the previous snapshot

Why scrape Spotify playlists

Spotify's official Playlists endpoint still works for individual playlists — but it requires OAuth, has aggressive rate limits, and as of November 2024 Spotify deprecated several adjacent endpoints (audio-features, related-artists, recommendations, algorithmic and editorial-playlist data). Editorial-playlist scraping is now the only reliable way to monitor RapCaviar, Today's Top Hits, mint, Pop Rising, Viva Latino, and the other 100+ flagship Spotify-owned playlists at scale.

This actor uses Spotify's pathfinder GraphQL endpoint with anonymous embed-token auth — the same path the public web player uses. No OAuth app registration, no rate-limit headaches, no Premium required. Pages through 100+ tracks at a time with pageSize 1-200.

The killer feature is the diff layer. Run twice and you get a clean audit of which tracks were added, removed, or moved (with their old and new positions) since the last run. Editorial pitching agencies pay Chartmetric or Spotontrack $80-300/month for this exact view; this actor does it at $0.01/playlist on whatever cron you want.

Input

Field	Default	Description
playlists	required	Array of Spotify playlist IDs (22-char), URIs (spotify:playlist:<id>), or open.spotify.com/playlist/<id> URLs
trackDiffs	true	If true, persist snapshots and emit added/removed/moved per run vs the previous one. Run twice to see the first diff.
pageSize	100	Tracks per pagination request, 1-200. Lower = more requests but more resilient on giant playlists

Output

{
  "uri": "spotify:playlist:37i9dQZF1DXcBWIGoYBM5M",
  "id": "37i9dQZF1DXcBWIGoYBM5M",
  "name": "Today's Top Hits",
  "description": "The hottest 50. Cover: Sabrina Carpenter",
  "followers": 33847291,
  "owner": {"name": "Spotify", "username": "spotify", "uri": "spotify:user:spotify"},
  "image_url": "https://i.scdn.co/image/ab67706f...",
  "total_tracks": 50,
  "is_editorial": true,
  "tracks": [
    {
      "position": 0,
      "uri": "spotify:track:1BxfuPKGuaTgP7aM0Bbdwr",
      "name": "Cruel Summer",
      "duration_ms": 178426,
      "explicit": false,
      "playable": true,
      "playcount": 2847391045,
      "added_at": "2024-08-12T00:00:00Z",
      "artists": [{"name": "Taylor Swift", "uri": "spotify:artist:06HL4z0..."}],
      "album": {"name": "Lover", "cover_url": "https://i.scdn.co/image/..."}
    }
  ],
  "diff": {
    "is_first_snapshot": false,
    "summary": {"added": 3, "removed": 3, "moved": 7, "unchanged": 40},
    "added": [{"position": 12, "uri": "spotify:track:abc...", "name": "..."}],
    "removed": [{"position": 47, "uri": "spotify:track:xyz...", "name": "..."}],
    "moved": [{"prev_position": 8, "new_position": 1, "uri": "...", "name": "..."}]
  }
}

Use cases

Indie label playlist pitching team monitoring their pitch list of 500 editorial + influential third-party playlists. Cron the actor daily, store the diff. Every morning your team gets a list of every playlist that swapped tracks — the perfect proxy for which curators are actively gardening their lists right now versus which are dormant. Pitch fresh adds first. $5/day for a 500-playlist pitch sheet beats $129/month Soundcharts and gives you raw JSON for your own CRM.

A&R scout tracking what RapCaviar, mint, and Today's Top Hits add. Editorial-playlist adds are the strongest leading signal of breakout artists in 2026 — Spotify's own data shows 30%+ of mainstream charting acts came through these flagship playlists first. Run this actor on the 20 flagship Spotify-owned playlists daily ($6/month). When a track appears in your diff.added, fire a webhook to Slack. You're now ahead of every major-label A&R who's still refreshing the playlist pages manually.

Sync-licensing music supervisor building mood-and-genre track shortlists. You don't want generic top hits — you want indie chill, dark-academia jazz, Y2K nostalgia, etc. Pull every track from 200 mood-curated user playlists (is_editorial: false), dedupe by URI, filter by playcount band, and you've got a few thousand contextually-relevant tracks ranked by reach. Pair with free-spotify-artist-analytics to enrich each track's artist with contact info and monthly listeners.

Music journalist / Substack writer doing the "what changed on Today's Top Hits this week" beat. The diff.added and diff.removed blocks plus the moved deltas are basically a free editorial column every Monday — the actor saves you 30 minutes of manual playlist diffing per piece. $0.01 per playlist per run.

How it compares

Actor / Tool	Price	Tracklist	Follower Count	Editorial Flag	Cross-run Diff
This actor	$0.01 / playlist	full	yes	yes	yes (built-in)
scrapearchitect/spotify-playlists-scraper (#1 SERP)	per-result	full	yes	no	no
easyapi/spotify-playlists-scraper	$2 + per-result	basic	yes	no	no
Spotify official Web API	free (with OAuth)	full	yes	no (no flag)	no
Chartmetric Pro	$140+ / month flat	full	yes	yes	yes

The cross-run diff layer is the differentiator. Most Apify playlist scrapers give you a snapshot — useful, but to track playlist churn you'd have to roll your own diff store. This actor does it for you in diff_store.py and emits clean per-run added/removed/moved records with the snapshot IDs included for audit.

Pricing

• $0.01 per playlist returned
• All pricing is pay-per-event — you only pay per result. No actor-start fee. A playlist with 10 tracks costs the same as a playlist with 8,000 tracks: one event.
• Pagination requests are bundled — you're not charged per page.

Limits and gotchas

• Anonymous scraping — no Spotify account or OAuth needed.
• pageSize capped at 200 by Spotify's GraphQL backend; defaults to 100 which works reliably even on 10,000-track user playlists.
• Diff state is stored in the actor's default key-value store scoped to your run. The first run is always

  is_first_snapshot: true
  with empty diff arrays — that's expected. Run twice to see the first real diff.
• Editorial detection — is_editorial is determined by owner.username == "spotify". Third-party "editorial-style" playlists (e.g. Filtr, Topsify, Digster) are not flagged because Spotify doesn't own them; if you need to track those, treat them as large user playlists.
• Private / collaborative playlists require login and will return a 404-style error.
• Region-restricted playlists still return their tracklist, but individual tracks may show playable: false for your scrape origin.
• Cold-start time is ~5-8s for the first playlist; subsequent playlists reuse the embed token and run at ~1-2s each plus 1s per 100-track page.

FAQ

Can I scrape Spotify playlists without OAuth? Yes. Anonymous embed-token auth works for any public playlist. No Spotify account, no developer-app registration, no client credentials.

How do I track which playlist added or dropped my song? Enable trackDiffs: true (default), schedule the actor on a daily or weekly cron, and on each run inspect diff.added / diff.removed. For a specific track URI, filter the diff arrays in your downstream loader.

Does this work on Spotify-owned editorial playlists? Yes — RapCaviar, Today's Top Hits, mint, Viva Latino, Pop Rising, NMF, all the regional Top 50s, and every other Spotify-owned playlist work. The is_editorial flag will be true for those.

What's the cost to monitor 100 playlists daily? $1/day = $30/month. For comparison, Chartmetric Pro starts around $140/month and Spotontrack starts around $90/month. Below ~13,000 playlist-checks/month this actor is meaningfully cheaper.

How fresh is the playlist data? Live at request time. Spotify updates editorial playlists multiple times per week (RapCaviar typically refreshes Fridays at 00:00 UTC, Today's Top Hits Fridays as well). User playlists update whenever the owner edits.

Related Actors

• Free Spotify Artist Analytics — monthly listeners, world rank, top tracks with playcount
• Free Spotify Charts Scraper — global Top Tracks / Albums / Artists weekly with rank deltas
• Free Spotify Podcast Catalog — podcast show metadata, episodes, ratings, publisher