Question

I noticed the search result may return multiple albums for a given artist and album, and the albums have the same release year. For example, the search of artist:”Foster The People” album:Torches returns 5 albums, and 4 of them look same (same release year, same album name, same artist, and same tracks of the album) although album uri is different. Can I assume the 1st (top) one is always the most recently added or released?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Probably not. However, order and date added isn’t relevant as long as the release year is the same.

You should check the results to see how many tracks are available to the user in each version of the album, as it can vary by region and will often vary by URI. What often happens in our catalog is that multiple versions of the same album are released to different territories but will still show up in search results.

To sum up:

• Order isn’t important.
• You should show the user the album which has most available tracks.

You can see this in our own desktop client too. If you view the artist Rihanna in the client, you’ll see a little arrow button just after the title of the album “Talk That Talk”. If you click that, you’ll see all of the releases of that album on Spotify. The client, by default, will only show you the one which has most available tracks.