Harvest 30-Second Preview URLs for a Tracklist

Spotify hosts a free 30-second MP3 for most tracks — it's the cheapest legal audio sample pipeline there is. Thirdwatch's Spotify Scraper reads Spotify's public embed pages — no API key, no OAuth app — and returns structured track rows for playlists, albums, artists, and individual tracks.

Skip the setup: Run this as a ready-to-go task on Apify — pre-loaded with the configuration from this guide.

Why harvest preview URLs

For audio fingerprinting, recommendation demos, or review tooling, a 30-second preview is enough — and Spotify serves them publicly. What's missing is a bulk way to collect the URLs.

Every track row carries previewUrl when the track offers one; a playlist run harvests dozens at once.

The scraper reads the embed surface directly, so a playlist URL in means a full tracklist dataset out.

How does this compare to the alternatives?

Why this Actor

• No API key or app registration — public embed pages carry the data.
• One input field accepts playlists, albums, artists and tracks together.
• Every track row includes a 30-second previewUrl MP3 when available.
• includeEntityRows adds a container-level summary row for each playlist or album.
• Pure HTTP and fast — a playlist pull costs a fraction of a cent.

How to do it in 3 steps

Step 1: Configure the input

Set the inputs as shown below — urls takes the targets, Playlist, album, artist and track URLs all work in the same input; maxTracksPerEntity bounds the tracklist size.

Step 2: Run the Actor

Run it from the console, the API, or the linked saved task. One dataset row is written per track.

Step 3: Use the output

Track rows carry artists, album, duration, release date, preview URL and Spotify URI; includeEntityRows adds a summary row per playlist or album.

{
  "urls": [
    "https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DXcBWIGoYBM5M"
  ],
  "maxTracksPerEntity": 50
}

Each dataset row looks like:

{
  "title": "Flowers",
  "artists": "Miley Cyrus",
  "parentName": "Today's Top Hits",
  "parentType": "playlist",
  "position": 1,
  "durationSec": 200,
  "isExplicit": false,
  "releaseDate": "2023-01-13",
  "previewUrl": "https://p.scdn.co/mp3-preview/...",
  "spotifyUrl": "https://open.spotify.com/track/...",
  "uri": "spotify:track:..."
}

What to watch for

Play counts and follower numbers aren't available — embed surfaces don't carry them, so playlist-popularity metrics are out of scope. Playlists return roughly the top 50 tracks per entity.

Related use cases

• Export a Spotify Playlist's Full Tracklist as Data
• Pull a Spotify Album's Track Metadata in One Run
• Export an Artist's Spotify Top Tracks and Info
• Compare Track Overlap Across Two Spotify Playlists
• All Thirdwatch use-case guides

Run the Spotify Scraper on Apify Store — pay per result, free to try, no credit card to test.