How to fetch artist genre data from Spotify Web API for playlist tracks

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1

I’m working on a project to export Spotify playlist data to CSV format and need help with JavaScript. I want to include genre information for each track but I’m running into some issues.

From what I understand, getting the genre requires:

  • Extracting genre info from the artist data
  • The basic playlist endpoint only gives limited artist details with just the ID
  • Making additional API calls to get full artist information including genres

I can successfully get artist IDs using this approach:

playlistData.items.forEach(function(song) {
  var artistIds = song.track.artists.map(function(performer) {
    return performer.id;
  }).join(', ');
});

My current data processing looks like this:

var songList = apiResponses.map(function(resp) {
  return resp.items.map(function(song) {
    return [
      song.track.uri,
      song.track.id, 
      song.track.name,
      song.track.artists.map(function(performer) {
        return performer.name;
      }).join(', '),
      song.track.artists.map(function(performer) {
        return performer.id;
      }).join(', '),
      song.track.album.name,
      song.track.disc_number,
      song.track.track_number,
      song.track.duration_ms,
      song.added_by == null ? '' : song.added_by.uri,
      song.added_at
    ];
  });
});

How can I use the artist ID to make another API call and retrieve the genre information to add as an extra column?

2

You need to handle the async API calls properly to get genre info. First, grab all the unique artist IDs from your playlist data - use a Set to avoid duplicates. Then create a separate function that hits the /v1/artists endpoint in batches of 50 (it supports batch requests). Store all the genre data in a Map with artist ID as the key. When you’re building your CSV, just reference that Map to pull in each artist’s genre info.

3

call the /artists/{id} endpoint after u get the artist IDs. batch up to 50 IDs per request with comma separation - it’s more efficient. use fetch('https://api.spotify.com/v1/artists/' + artistIds.join(',')) then pull the genres array from each artist object. cache the results since the same artists show up multiple times in playlists.