Track and Artist Name Formatting Standards in Spotify Web API

Other Questions Spotify
1

Hey everyone! I’m building an app that needs to compare songs from Spotify with tracks in another music database. The main problem I’m running into is that the track names don’t match up properly because of different formatting styles.

For example, some songs have “feat” while others use “featuring” or “ft”. Same thing happens with remixes where I see variations like “Remix”, “RMX”, or “(Remix)”.

Has anyone worked with Spotify’s API enough to know what formatting rules they follow? I need to understand how they structure both song titles and artist names so I can create better matching logic.

Any documentation or experience you can share would be really helpful. Thanks!

2

Spotify doesn’t enforce any strict formatting - the data comes from different labels and distributors, so it’s a mess everywhere. Newer tracks usually use “feat.” but older ones have random variations. Parentheses are all over the place too - sometimes features are in them, sometimes not. Remixes are even worse - you’ll see “(Official Remix)”, “RMX”, or whatever else they felt like using. Build a solid normalization function that strips common variations and converts everything to one format before comparing. Use fuzzy string matching like Levenshtein distance too - exact matches fail constantly with music data.