I’m working on an app that needs to track when users make changes to their music collections and playlists on Spotify. Right now I have to keep polling their API to check for updates, which isn’t very efficient.
Does anyone know if Spotify has announced plans to add webhook functionality? It would be really helpful to get real-time notifications when someone adds songs to their library or modifies their playlists.
If webhooks aren’t available yet, what are some good alternatives? I’m thinking about using periodic API calls but I’m worried about hitting rate limits. Has anyone found a better approach for staying in sync with user data changes?
no webhooks from spotify yet - i’ve been waiting forever too. some devs build their own notification system with websockets, but it’s pretty hacky. you could cache playlist etags and only fetch when they change to save bandwidth. worth checking out third-party services that combine music apis.
From what I’ve heard through developer channels, Spotify’s been talking about webhook support internally but there’s no public timeline or commitment. Their platform team’s focused on other stuff right now. For the polling limits, I’ve had good luck with a queue-based system that batches requests and spreads them out over longer intervals. Instead of checking everything constantly, I prioritize recently active playlists and use the snapshot_id field to catch changes without pulling all the data. The rate limits aren’t as bad as they seem if you structure requests right - you can hit around 100 calls per minute on most endpoints. Try using their Web Playback SDK with the API since it gives you real-time playback info, though it won’t completely fix the playlist monitoring problem.
Spotify still hasn’t given us a timeline for webhooks, even after years of asking. I ended up using a hybrid approach - smart caching plus background sync workers. The trick is exponential backoff and tracking user sessions to guess when they’re actually making changes. When someone’s active, I poll every 30-60 seconds. When they’re offline, I drop it to hourly. BTW, enterprise clients apparently get better API access, but us regular devs are stuck with pretty limited real-time options.
I’ve dealt with this exact issue building music apps. Spotify still doesn’t support webhooks and their API updates crawl along at a snail’s pace. What’s worked for me is adaptive polling - ramp up the frequency when users are active, dial it back when they’re not. This keeps you under rate limits. Also, check playlist timestamps before polling so you’re only grabbing data when something actually changed. Saves a ton of unnecessary calls.