ShareMyPlaylists, the Spotify community and playlist sharing site, has released an API so that developers can get access to its treasure trove of playlist data — 120,000 playlists, referencing a total of 20 million tracks — and start to build apps or integrations on top of the service. The news will be formally announced at Music Hack Day Stockholm this weekend, an event that the company is sponsoring and where CEO and founder Kieron Donoghue hopes he’ll get a “feel” for the types of apps and who might leverage its data.
It’s potentially interesting data, too. The user-generated playlists themselves have quite a lot of metadata attached, such as the number of plays (or popularity), related playlist recommendations, artists featured, genre, playlist author, and track/playlist running times. In addition, ShareMyPlaylists publishes chart data — top 50 playlists, top 50 tracks, and top 50 artists — which is updated just after midnight each Sunday, and this is also being made available via its API along with playlist reviews submitted by users. So there’s quite a lot to play with.
On that note, Donoghue says that in terms of size and quality of its curated playlists, ShareMyPlaylists is “unrivalled”, setting it apart from competitors such as Songza. “I think the opportunities for a third-party to utilise them, along with our other biggest asset which is our chart data, is huge”, he says.
In terms of what wares could materialise out of that opportunity, examples of mashups provided by the company include a simple mosaic of playlist artwork that refreshes with the latest additions, and another that combines this with chart data (playlists, tracks and artists) along with various other data. Fun but fairly limited stuff, so it will be interesting to see what a bunch of — hopefully more imaginative — hackers produce this weekend in Stockholm, which is the whole point of ShareMyPlaylists backing Music Hack Day.
For code monkeys developers wanting to get their hands on the new ShareMyPlaylists API, they’ll need to first sign up for a free account and then request access.