Manage Albums in a User’s Profile

Learn how to save or delete an album from a user profile using Spotify API.

We'll cover the following

Spotify users can save albums of their favorite songs on the platform. All the saved albums can be viewed from the user’s profile. We can manage the albums saved in a user profile using the Spotify API. In this lesson, we’ll discuss two types of HTTP requests. One is used to save an album to the current user profile whereas the other is used to remove an album from a user profile.

Album management

We can use the base URL https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/albums to save or delete an album to the current user's profile. A PUT request to this endpoint saves the album, whereas a DELETE request deletes the specified album.

Note: The user is the one with whom the authorization code access token is associated. Currently, we're using access tokens associated with our own profile, so we'll be making changes to our own resources.

Request parameters

This endpoint has the following query parameter:

Query parameter

Category

Type

Description

ids

Optional

String

This contains the IDs of the albums we want to save or delete from the current user's profile. These IDs are separated by commas (,). We can save a maximum of 20 albums with one call.

The table below contains the body parameter of this endpoint.

Body parameter

Category

Type

Description

ids

Optional

String

This contains the IDs of the albums we want to save or delete from the current user's profile. These IDs are separated by commas (,). We can save or delete a maximum of 50 albums with one call using this parameter. If we use the ids query parameter, the IDs listed here will be overridden.

Note: We can use the Search for Item endpoint to get the Spotify ID of an album.

Let's look at how this endpoint is used to save albums with the authorization code access token. We're providing the IDs of Pitbull's album Can't Stop Us Now, and Bruno Mars' albums Doo-Wops & Hooligans as the values for the query parameter ids.

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const endpointUrl = new URL('https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/albums');
const queryParameters = new URLSearchParams({
  ids: '4aawyAB9vmqN3uQ7FjRGTy,1uyf3l2d4XYwiEqAb7t7fX'
});
//4aawyAB9vmqN3uQ7FjRGTy is the ID of Pitbull's album Can't Stop Us Now
//1uyf3l2d4XYwiEqAb7t7fX is the ID of Bruno Mars's album Doo-Wops And Hooligans
headerParameters = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer {{AUTHORIZATION_CODE_ACCESS_TOKEN}}'
}
const bodyParameters={}
const options = {
  method: 'PUT',
  headers: headerParameters,
  body: bodyParameters,
};
async function saveAlbum() {
  try {
    endpointUrl.search = queryParameters;
    const response = await fetch(endpointUrl, options);
    printResponse(response);
  } catch (error) {
    printError(error);
  }
}
saveAlbum();

Let's look at the code explanation:

  • Line 1: We set the URL to https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/albums.

  • Lines 3–5: We define the query parameters.

  • Line 14: We define an empty object, bodyParameters. Even though we are not using body parameters in this case, we still send an empty object as body parameters because it is required for this endpoint.

  • Line 17: We set the request type to PUT.

  • Lines 22–30: We define a function, saveAlbum(), that calls the defined endpoint and prints the response.

Let's delete one of the two albums we saved above from our profile by sending a DELETE request to https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/albums. Just like the case where we saved albums, we'll use the query parameters to delete the album.

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const endpointUrl = new URL('https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/albums');
const queryParameters = new URLSearchParams({
  ids: '4aawyAB9vmqN3uQ7FjRGTy'
});
//4aawyAB9vmqN3uQ7FjRGTy is the ID of Pitbull's album Can't Stop Us Now
headerParameters = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer {{AUTHORIZATION_CODE_ACCESS_TOKEN}}'
}
const bodyParameters={}
const options = {
  method: 'DELETE',
  headers: headerParameters,
  body: bodyParameters,
};
async function saveAlbum() {
  try {
    endpointUrl.search = queryParameters;
    const response = await fetch(endpointUrl, options);
    printResponse(response);
  } catch (error) {
    printError(error);
  }
}
saveAlbum();

Let's look at the modifications we made in the code:

  • Lines 4: We set only one ID as a query parameter as we want to remove a single album.

  • Line 13: We change the request type to DELETE.

  • Line 21: We change the function's name to removeAlbum().

Try removing multiple albums from the user's library by adding more IDs (separated by commas) in line 4.

Response fields

The content of the response is empty for a successful request, and the value of status_code is 200. For an unsuccessful request, we get a message in response that tells us about the error.