Playlist Miner Spotify

The Spotify Web API team pushed out a new feature recently that extends thesearch API to include playlist search. With this new feature it is now possible to search across all of the popular public playlists created by Spotify users. To try out the new search capability I created a new web app called The Playlist Miner.

The Playlist Mineris a web app that will create a Spotify playlist for you by finding the top songs in all of the playlists that match your criteria. Say, for example, that Iwant to create a dinner party playlist. First, I find the top playlists that match dinner party with The Playlist Miner:

The Playlist Minerwill find up to the top 1,000 most popular playlists that matchdinner party.It shows them to me, giving mea chance to refine myquery to focus in on the exact type of playlist that I am interested in.

For this first try, I see lots of Christmas-oriented playlists [Tis the Season after all], but since Im looking for music for a post-holiday dinner party, Id rather not have holiday music in the playlist. So I refine my query to find non-Christmas oriented dinner party playlists like so:

The resulting playlists are suitably non-Christmasy.

I like the look of these playlists so Ihit the Find Top Tracks button and The Playlist Minerwill scour through all of the matching playlists [290 of them in this case] and find the most frequently appearing tracks.

Once the top 100 tracks are found, Ican savethem to Spotify as myown playlist.

SelectingPrefer more distinctive labor and delivery tracksadjusts the track order for popularity so that tracks that are more distinctive to the particular playlist context will rise to the top.You can also use logical operators to focus in on the exact type of playlist you want to. You can search for work out OR workout NOT running to find workout playlists withoutrunning in their titles/descriptions.

Under the hood The Playlist Miner uses lots of bits of the Spotify API user authentication, playlist search, playlist reading, playlist saving and more.The appis a an API calling beast aggregating all the tracks from a thousand playlists requires 1,000 API calls. Its a testament to the Spotify Web API that it doesnt even blink under the load. You can play with the code on github.

Its fun to use The Playlist Minerto explore the quirkier aspects of how people listen to music. There are ironing playlists and sleeping baby playlists. There are playlists for gettingpsychedand playlists for Labor and Delivery. With the Playlist Miner you can pull from all the playlists created for a particular purpose and build your own. Give it a try.