delight.fm: day 12

Adding artists

I worked on adding artists today. My initial plan was to use the data that Spotify provides on the artists that you’re following. But alas, it’s not that easy.

Turns out the following data only shows the artists that you specifically clicked follow on. Maybe a good thing, but it doesn’t reflect the artists that show up in your Artists list in the app.

It’s a similar issue to the saved albums problem I ran into yesterday. To work around this, I’m using the track information to collect the artists as well. This means that if you’re following an artist, but haven’t added any of their songs to your library, they won’t show up for you right now. Maybe use both in the future, but for now, I’m assuming if you really like an artist, you’ll add one of their songs to your library.

APIs don’t always give you the information that you expect or would like to get. That’s the nature of APIs and you have to work with what’s available. That’s just one of the constraints when connecting to an outside service.