Free Spotify Podcast Catalog — Show Metadata, Episodes & Ratings API

Scrape any Spotify podcast for full show metadata, paginated episode list with descriptions, ratings, publisher, topics, and audio preview URLs. The fields the official Spotify Web API leaves blank — average star rating, total ratings count, topic tags, trailer URI, paywall flag — all in one call. $0.012 per podcast.

What you get

• Show metadata: name, publisher, description, html_description, media_type (audio / video / mixed), content_type, show_types, consumption_order
• rating — average star rating (e.g. 4.7), total_ratings count (e.g. 28,491), and Spotify's internal show_average. Not in the public Spotify Web API.
• topics[] — Spotify's content classification tags (e.g. True Crime, Society & Culture, Comedy Interviews)
• trailer_uri — direct URI of the show trailer episode if one exists
• cover_art[] — full size variants with width/height
• share_url — the canonical share URL
• episodes[] — paginated episode list with name, description, release_date, duration_ms, audio_preview_url, is_paywalled, is_trailer, is_19_plus, has_video, playable, share_url, cover_art[]
• playability flag with reason (e.g. why a region-blocked show is unplayable)

Why scrape Spotify for podcast data

Spotify's official Web API returns name, description, publisher, and a thin episodes list — but no ratings, no topics, no trailer flag, no paywall flag, no audio preview URLs for non-licensee callers, and no media_type distinction between audio shows and video shows. For competitive intelligence on the podcast catalog you need the fields Spotify renders to anyone visiting open.spotify.com/show/<id>, not the slim public-API subset.

This actor uses the same pathfinder GraphQL endpoint Spotify's public web player uses, with anonymous embed-token auth. No Spotify account, no Premium subscription, no developer-app OAuth registration. You get every public-facing field including the star rating Spotify displays under the show title.

Real value for the typical buyer: a podcast network doing competitive benchmarking against 50 shows in their genre pays $0.60/run and gets average rating + total ratings + topic tags + episode cadence all together. A pitching agency doing host research for guest-booking pulls 500 shows for $6 with publisher + share URLs ready to feed into their CRM. Compared to Listen Notes Pro at $99/month or Podscribe enterprise plans at $500+/month, this actor is dramatically cheaper when you don't need transcription on top.

Input

Field	Default	Description
shows	required	Array of Spotify show IDs (22-char), URIs (spotify:show:<id>), or open.spotify.com/show/<id> URLs (incl. /intl-xx/ paths)
maxEpisodes	unset (all)	Cap episodes returned per show. Leave blank to fetch the full back catalog. Useful for shows with 1,000+ episodes when you only want recent ones.
pageSize	50	Episodes per pagination request, 1-100

Output

{
  "uri": "spotify:show:4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk",
  "id": "4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk",
  "name": "The Joe Rogan Experience",
  "publisher": "Joe Rogan",
  "description": "The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.",
  "media_type": "MIXED",
  "content_type": "PODCAST",
  "music_and_talk": false,
  "show_types": ["AUDIO", "VIDEO"],
  "playable": true,
  "rating": {
    "average": 4.5,
    "total_ratings": 184729,
    "show_average": 4.5
  },
  "topics": [
    {"title": "Society & Culture", "uri": "spotify:topic:..."},
    {"title": "Comedy Interviews", "uri": "spotify:topic:..."}
  ],
  "cover_art": [
    {"url": "https://i.scdn.co/image/...", "width": 640, "height": 640}
  ],
  "trailer_uri": null,
  "share_url": "https://open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk",
  "episode_count_fetched": 2178,
  "episodes": [
    {
      "position": 0,
      "uri": "spotify:episode:7E9...",
      "name": "#2245 - Bret Weinstein",
      "description": "Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist...",
      "release_date": "2026-04-25T00:00:00Z",
      "duration_ms": 11483920,
      "explicit": true,
      "is_trailer": false,
      "is_19_plus": false,
      "is_paywalled": false,
      "has_video": true,
      "playable": true,
      "audio_preview_url": "https://podz-content...",
      "share_url": "https://open.spotify.com/episode/..."
    }
  ]
}

Use cases

Podcast network doing competitive benchmarking across 50 shows in their vertical (e.g. true-crime, business interview, sports). Run the actor weekly. Track rating.average, rating.total_ratings, and the release cadence of episodes[].release_date to see which competitors are gaining traction, which have stopped publishing, and which topics are recurring across the genre. $0.60 per weekly run vs Listen Notes Pro at $99/month flat.

Guest-booking / podcast PR agency building target lists for client pitches. Feed in 500 candidate shows from a topic/genre seed list. Filter on rating.average >= 4.0 and rating.total_ratings >= 100 to drop dead shows, then use publisher + share_url for outreach and topics[] to match client expertise. $6 a run beats spending a day on ListenNotes manually.

Podcast advertising buyer vetting inventory before paying ad budget. The publicly-rendered rating.total_ratings is a strong proxy for actual listener engagement (vs. the easily-gamed download counts publishers report). Pull 200 shows on a media plan, sort by ratings density (total_ratings / episode_count_fetched), and drop the bottom quartile from your buy. $2.40 of due diligence saving you potentially thousands in wasted spend.

Podcast SEO / discovery research — the topics[] array contains Spotify's own categorization, which is what gets used in search/discovery surfacing. If you're launching a new show or relaunching, scrape the top 100 shows in your target topic, look at the topic-tag overlap and the publisher-name patterns, and reverse- engineer how Spotify is shelving content in your category.

How it compares

Actor / Tool	Price	Episode List	Star Rating	Topics	Audio Preview URL
This actor	$0.012 / podcast	full pagination	yes	yes	yes
benthepythondev/spotify-podcast-scraper (#1 SERP)	per-result	full	partial	no	no
apiharvest/spotify-podcasts-search-and-scraper	per-result	full	yes	yes	partial
Spotify official Web API	free (with OAuth)	full	no	no	no
Listen Notes Pro	$99+ / month flat	yes	yes	yes	yes (own preview)
Podscribe	$500+ / month flat	yes (w/ transcripts)	yes	yes	yes

The closest competitors are Listen Notes Pro at $99/month and Podscribe / Magellan AI at $500+/month flat-rate enterprise — both charge you whether or not you query. This actor is pay-per-use, so querying 200 shows once costs $2.40, not $99.

apiharvest/spotify-podcasts-search-and-scraper is the closest feature-equivalent on the Apify Store; it's been refreshed regularly in 2026 and is the actor to beat on quality. We match topic + rating extraction and add the structured is_paywalled / is_19_plus / has_video flags that subscription-podcast and video-podcast researchers care about.

Pricing

• $0.012 per podcast returned
• All pricing is pay-per-event — you only pay per result. No actor-start fee. A show with 10 episodes costs the same as a show with 3,000 episodes: one event.
• Errors (deleted show, region-blocked, invalid input) are not billed.

Limits and gotchas

• Anonymous scraping — no Spotify account, no Premium subscription required. The audio preview URLs returned are the public ones Spotify exposes to logged-out browsers (used for the in-page preview).
• maxEpisodes is the right knob for very long-running shows (Joe Rogan Experience, Daily Wire, etc. have 1,000-3,000+ episodes). Default fetches everything which costs more time.
• Paywalled episodes still appear in the list with is_paywalled: true and playable: false — you get metadata but no audio preview URL.
• Region-blocked shows return a top-level playable: false with a playability_reason. Episode metadata is still surfaced.
• rating may be null for shows under Spotify's minimum review threshold (typically <100 ratings). That's not a scraper bug, it's Spotify hiding the average until enough ratings accumulate.
• Audio podcasts vs video podcasts — media_type is one of AUDIO, VIDEO, or MIXED; show_types array tells you which formats individual episodes are available in.
• Cold-start time is ~5-8s for the first show; subsequent shows reuse the embed token at ~1-2s each + 1s per 50-episode page.

FAQ

Can I get podcast ratings without the Spotify API? Yes. The official Spotify Web API does not expose podcast ratings — only show metadata. This actor pulls the exact average rating and total_ratings integer Spotify displays on the public show page.

Does this scrape episode transcripts? No. Transcripts are a separate Spotify product (often paywalled to the publisher in Spotify-for-Podcasters) and not exposed in the same GraphQL endpoint. For transcripts at scale, you'd combine this actor (for show + episode discovery) with a transcription tool downstream.

Does this need a Spotify Premium account? No. Auth uses anonymous embed tokens that any logged-out browser gets. You don't need a Spotify account at all.

What's the cost to track 200 podcasts weekly? $2.40/week = ~$10/month. Compared to Listen Notes Pro at $99/month or Podscribe at $500+/month, the break-even for monthly cost is around 8,000 podcast-fetches per month.

How fresh is the data? Live at request time. New episodes appear in this actor's output the moment they're published on Spotify.

Related Actors

• Free Spotify Artist Analytics — monthly listeners, world rank, top tracks with playcount
• Free Spotify Playlist Intelligence — playlist tracklists, follower count, editorial flag, run-over-run diff
• Free Spotify Charts Scraper — global Top Tracks / Albums / Artists weekly with rank deltas