How to Create Spotify Playlists from End-of-Year Album Lists
While there are plenty of tools for creating playlists with individual songs, I’ve found few that make it simple to create playlists with all the tracks from specific albums. This is especially helpful at the end of the year, when I’m exploring “Best of the Year” album lists and want to dive into entire albums. By combining a tool I built with Spotlistr, you can transform album-artist lists into Spotify playlists that include every track from each album.
The Problem
At the end of every year, I always come across best of lists featuring albums I missed out on. Manually searching for each album on Spotify and adding its tracks to a playlist is tedious. I wanted a faster way to generate full album playlists.
The Solution
Here’s how I solved the problem:
1. Copy List from the Web
I use a shortcut on my iPhone that can scrape web content directly from Safari. When browsing an end-of-year album list on my phone, I share the page with this shortcut which copies the entire text into my clipboard. Note: I'm often on mobile but you can also just easily copy/paste lists on desktop web.
2. Extract Album and Artist Names
Once I have the list I often need to clean it up so I paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to:
“Extract only the album titles and artist names, formatted as ‘Artist - Album’ pairs, with each pair on a new line and line no numbers, bullets or extra text.”
This step generates a clean list of album-artist pairs to use (e.g., Charli xcx - BRAT).
3. Create a Spotify Web API App
To use the tool, you’ll first need to set up a Spotify Web API app. It’s simple and takes about 60 seconds:
- Log in to Spotify for Developers.
- Click Create an App, give it a name, sign up to use the Web API, and set
localhostas the return URI. - Copy the client token and secret provided.
4. Setup the Tool with your Credentials
Paste the client token and secret into step 1 of the tool I built and press Authenticate. Note: I don't store or log anything but you are welcome to download the html file if you want to run it locally.
5. Convert Album-Artist Pairs to Spotify URLs
Copy and paste your cleaned up list of album-artist pairs into step 2 of the tool. It will automatically generate Spotify album URIs, saving you from manually searching for each album on Spotify. Once created, copy the generated Spotify URIs.
6. Generate a Playlist with Tracks from Each Album Using Spotlistr
Once you have the Spotify album URIs, it’s time to create the playlist:
- Open Spotlistr.
- Paste the list of Spotify album URIs into Spotlistr.
- Spotlistr will automatically generate a playlist, pulling all the tracks from each album.
The result is a Spotify playlist that includes every track from the albums on your list—not just a single song from each. Note: You'll want to reference the original list and make sure you found tracks for the correct album, some are bound to be wrong but this should get you most of the way there.
Why It’s Useful
This approach creates a playlist featuring every track from each artist’s album. If you frequently discover music through curated lists, this workflow transforms a tedious task into a more efficient process. If you dig what you discover hopefully you’ll consider supporting both the artist and the source of the list!