# Track new Spotify releases in a Google Sheets release log

> Every morning we check your artist watchlist for new albums, singles, and compilations and add each one to a searchable spreadsheet log.

- Workflow type: code
- Services: Spotify, Google Sheets
- Categories: Operations
- Published: 2026-08-09

## What it does

- Runs every morning at 6am and checks each artist on your watchlist for anything released since the last check.
- Covers albums, singles, and compilations, so short drops and reissues do not slip past you.
- Adds one row per release with the release date, artist, title, release type, track count, track names, and a link to open it in Spotify.
- Skips anything already in the sheet, so re-runs and re-listings in other countries never create duplicate rows.

## What you'll need

- A Spotify account you can connect. Any plan works, since this only reads public catalog information.
- A Google account with edit access to the spreadsheet you want to use.
- A Google Sheet with a tab named Releases.
- The list of artists you want to watch. Each artist has an ID in the link to their Spotify page, and you paste those into the workflow.

## Prompt

Every morning at 6am, check a watchlist of Spotify artists for new releases and append each one to a release log in Google Sheets. Use a cron trigger, since Spotify does not send outgoing webhooks. Build this as a code workflow: every step is deterministic, so there is no drafting or judgement involved.

Keep the watchlist as a configured list of Spotify artist IDs in the workflow config, alongside the Google Sheets spreadsheet ID, the tab name to write to (default: Releases), and an initial lookback window in days (default: 30).

For each artist ID, call Spotify Get an Artist once to resolve the display name for the artist column. Then call Spotify Get Artist's Albums with include_groups set to album, single, and compilation, and page through all results. Select the releases whose release_date falls on or after the cutoff date. The cutoff is the date of the previous successful run; on the very first run, fall back to the configured initial lookback window. Spotify returns partial dates for some older releases, so read release_date_precision and treat a year-only or year-and-month value as the first day of that period when comparing.

Before writing anything, read the album IDs already in the sheet using Google Sheets Get Values over the album ID column of the Releases tab. Drop any candidate whose Spotify album ID is already present, and also dedupe within the run itself, because the same album can come back more than once across markets and across artist credits on collaborations.

For each remaining new release, call Spotify Get an Album to pull the title, release date, album type, and total track count, plus the Spotify URL from external_urls. Then call Spotify Get Album Tracks, paging through it, to collect the track names in track order and join them into a single semicolon separated string.

Sort the new releases by release date ascending, then write them in one Google Sheets Append Values call to the Releases tab, one row per release, with the columns in this fixed order: release date, artist name, release title, album type, track count, track names, Spotify URL, Spotify album ID. If the tab is empty, write the header row first.

Do not include popularity, danceability, energy, or any other audio feature column. Spotify removed that data in February 2026 and it is no longer available. Our Spotify integration is read only and exposes exactly five operations: Get an Artist, Get Artist's Albums, Get an Album, Get Album Tracks, and Get a Track. There is no search operation, so the watchlist has to be a configured list of artist IDs rather than artist names looked up at runtime.

Handle Spotify rate limiting: on a 429 response, wait for the number of seconds given in the Retry-After header and retry. If one artist ID fails, log it and continue with the rest of the watchlist rather than failing the whole run, and only advance the stored cutoff date when the run completes.

## How to customize

- Change the run time, or move it to weekly if a daily check is more than you need.
- Add or remove artists from the watchlist at any time without touching the rest of the setup.
- Narrow it to full albums only, or keep singles and compilations in the mix.
- Rename the tab or reorder the columns to match a sheet your team already uses.

## Example output

Releases tab, newest run appended at the bottom:

Release date | Artist | Release title | Album type | Tracks | Track names | Spotify URL | Album ID
2026-08-07 | Yaeji | Blue Hour | single | 2 | Blue Hour; Blue Hour (Extended) | https://open.spotify.com/album/... | 3kL9pQmXv2...
2026-08-08 | Hiatus Kaiyote | Love Heart Cheat Code (Deluxe) | album | 14 | Dimly Lit; Telescope; Everything's Beautiful; ... | https://open.spotify.com/album/... | 7bZq1Wc0Rd...

## FAQ

### Do I need Spotify Premium for this?

No. This only reads public catalog information about artists and their releases, so a free account works fine.

### Will it add duplicate rows if it runs twice in the same day?

No. Before writing anything it reads the release IDs already in your sheet and skips any it has seen before, so re-runs are safe.

### Can it pick up releases from before I set this up?

The first run looks back over a window you choose, so you can widen that window once to backfill recent history and then let it run day to day.

### Can I get columns like popularity, danceability, or energy?

No. Spotify stopped sharing that data in February 2026, so those columns are not available from any tool. You get release date, artist, title, release type, track count, track names, and the Spotify link.

### How many artists can I put on the watchlist?

A roster of a few dozen runs comfortably in one morning pass. Very large lists are better split across a couple of runs so Spotify does not slow the workflow down.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/track-new-spotify-releases-in-a-google-sheets-release-log