Yesterday, I Spotified the Billboard Hot 100 – making it easy to listen to the charts. This morning I went one step further and Spotified all of the Billboard Album and Singles charts.
The Spotified Billboard Charts
That’s 128 singles charts (which includes charts like Luxembourg Digital Songs, Hot Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Song and Hot Ringtones ) and 83 album charts including charts like Top Bluegrass Albums, Top Cast Albums and Top R&B Catalog Albums.
In these 211 charts you’ll find 6,482 Spotify tracks, 2354 being unique (some tracks, like Miley Cyrus’s ‘The Climb’ appear on many charts).
Building the charts stretches the API limits of the Billboard API (only 1,500 calls allowed per day!), as well as stretches my patience (making about 10K calls to the Spotify API while trying not to exceed the rate limit, means it takes a couple of hours to resolve all the tracks). Nevertheless, it was a fun little project. And it shows off the Spotify catalog quite well. For popular western music they have really good coverage.
Requests for the Billboard API: Please increase the usage limit by 10 times. 1,500 calls per day is really limiting, especially when trying to debug a client library.
Requests for the Spotify API: Please, Please Please!!! – make it possible to create and modify Spotify playlists via web services.
Music Machinery 
#1 by Rebecca on November 9, 2009 - 4:37 pm
I wish this was a link to a Spotify playlist that was the current Billboard 200 or any of the other charts, it would be much easier for me to listen to the charts instead of clicking on each individual link. Someone did this with the UK Official Charts listing every number 1 since the beginning, which I find useful that’s here http://open.spotify.com/user/sjhunt/playlist/5q5IHvVcnBYP1Dr1nIwBPN. Is there a possibility of developing something like this as well?
#2 by Paul on November 9, 2009 - 4:54 pm
Rebecca: Unfortunately, Spotify doesn’t provide a programmer API for creating playlists, so any playlists have to be created by hand.
#3 by Bobcat Zed on November 30, 2009 - 3:43 am
Well, they actually do if your’e on Linux. Then there is libspotify that allows you (among other things) to create playlists. It requires you to know C though. If that would fit your environment and you think you would need a bit of help, throw me an e-mail.
Regards,
Bobcat Zed
#4 by Paul on November 30, 2009 - 4:55 am
Hi Bobcat – I’ve been playing with the Java version (jotify) this weekend. Works great. I think I’ll work on making real spotify playists of the billboard 200 real soon.
#5 by norz on November 14, 2009 - 10:10 am
Indeed, being able to automatically create a Spotify playlist would be much more convenient.
I’d like to be able to convert lists of tracks on last.fm (from a tag, from my playlists, etc) to a Spotify playlist, without having to click on each track manually.
Please Spotify team? :)
#6 by Paul on November 14, 2009 - 10:33 am
Norz: Sounds like you need this Greasemonkey mentioned in this post on the spotify blog:
http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2008/12/18/spotify-scrobbles/
#7 by norz on November 30, 2009 - 3:03 pm
Thanks Paul, it’s a great script, and I love it, but when you’re on a Last.fm page, you still have to click on each track to load them into Spotify…
(and then queue the track, or add it to a playlist)
#8 by Bobcat Zed on November 30, 2009 - 6:10 am
Sounds great!
Just remember that Jotify isn’t an official library from Spotify. But as far as I have understood it, they usualy don’t bother to care if you use that instead of libspotify.