What Spotify’s API changes did to playlist tracking 🔌

If a playlist promotion service tells you they will watch your placement and alert you if your track comes off, it is worth asking how. The answer involves Spotify's API, and Spotify has made that answer much harder over the last two years.

What changed

A newly registered Spotify app sits in development mode. In development mode it can have five authorised users. Not five hundred. Five.

Getting out of development mode means applying for extended quota, and since May 2025 that is restricted to organisations: a legally registered business, running a launched service, with at least 250,000 monthly active users. Individual developers are no longer eligible at all.

From February 2026 there is a further restriction: a development-mode app cannot read another user's playlist contents. Only playlists the authorising user owns or collaborates on come back.

What that means in practice

Automated placement tracking at any scale needs either a curator to connect their Spotify account — capped at five across the whole platform — or extended quota, which needs a quarter of a million monthly users you do not have until long after you would need the feature.

So when a small service promises drop alerts on every playlist, one of a few things is true: they have grandfathered access from years ago, they are checking manually, they are scraping, or they are not really doing it.

What we do

We do not offer it. We built it, looked at what five connected accounts would actually cover, and took it off the site rather than ship a feature that would work for the first five curators and nobody after them.

So there is no drop-alert claim on this site, and the FAQ says plainly that we do not track placements. If Spotify's terms change, or we ever clear their bar, that answer changes with it — and it will change by us turning something on, not by quietly redefining what we meant.

It is a smaller promise than the one our competitors make. It is the one we can keep.