How to Browse Albums by Genre: Last.fm + Spotify Combined

Spotify's catalog contains over 100 million tracks spread across roughly 4 million albums, according to Spotify's developer documentation. Browsing that catalog by genre directly through Spotify's own app is limited. The search bar works for artists and tracks, but filtering by genre to get a full album list requires a different approach.

The Two-Step Method

This tool combines two separate APIs. First, Last.fm provides the genre-to-artist mapping. You enter a tag like "shoegaze" or "drum and bass," and Last.fm returns its top artists for that tag. Second, Spotify provides the discography for each of those artists. The tool searches Spotify for each artist, then fetches their albums, merges the results, removes duplicates, and displays the final list.

Last.fm's genre tags are crowd-validated by millions of listeners. When millions of people tag My Bloody Valentine as "shoegaze," that classification is more reliable than any editorial team could produce manually. The tags reflect how real listeners categorize music, which tends to be more granular and accurate than platform editorial genres.

Album Types: Albums vs. Singles vs. Compilations

The Spotify albums endpoint accepts an include_groups parameter that filters results by release type. The three main types work differently:

Albums are full-length releases. Spotify classifies most LP releases here. This is the default mode for exploring an artist's main catalog.
Singles are individual track releases and EPs. Many artists release music between albums as singles. Filtering to singles shows you everything that did not make it onto a full LP.
Compilations are collections, greatest hits packages, and label samplers. For genres like jazz or classical, compilations often contain the most accessible entry points for new listeners.

The "All" option fetches all three types together. This gives the widest view but produces more results to scroll through.

How Artist Search Matching Works

For each artist returned by Last.fm, the tool runs a Spotify search using the query format artist:"artist name" and takes the first result. This works well for most artists, but it has known limitations. Some artists share names with other artists and may return the wrong Spotify profile. Some artists have multiple Spotify profiles, usually due to distributor inconsistencies, which means not all their albums appear under one ID. Niche or regional artists may not have a Spotify presence at all.

When the first search result is a different artist, the albums shown will not match your expectations. This is a known limitation of the name-matching approach. We skip any artist where no Spotify result is found rather than showing incorrect data.

Deduplication and Sorting

The same album sometimes appears multiple times under different artist profiles or different regional releases. The tool deduplicates results by comparing the normalized album name combined with the normalized primary artist name. "Normalized" means lowercased with all punctuation and spaces removed, so "In Rainbows" and "in rainbows" collapse to the same entry.

You can sort results by release date newest to oldest, release date oldest to newest, or alphabetically. The default is newest first, which makes it easier to spot recent additions to a genre's catalog. For a more focused look at new releases specifically, try the New Releases by Genre tool, which filters to a configurable recency window.

How the Spotify Authentication Works

This tool uses Spotify's PKCE authorization flow with an empty scope list. That means when you click "Connect with Spotify," you see Spotify's authorization screen asking you to continue, but no actual permissions are requested. The token grants access only to Spotify's public catalog endpoints, which do not require user-level scopes. No reading of your playlists, no access to your listening history, no modification of your account.

The access token is stored in sessionStorage, which means it is cleared when you close your browser tab. You can revoke app access at any time from your Spotify account apps page.

Rate Limiting

Spotify's API returns HTTP 429 when too many requests are sent in a short window. This tool processes artists one at a time with a 100ms delay between each API call rather than sending all requests at once. This keeps the request rate within safe limits. The tradeoff is that fetching 20 artists takes a few seconds longer than a parallel approach would. A progress indicator shows which artist is currently being fetched.

Genre Discovery Tools

Once you have browsed albums in a genre, you might want to dig deeper. The New Releases by Genre tool filters results to a specific time window so you can see what came out in the last 30 or 90 days. The Genre Tag Explorer shows you related tags, top tracks, and listener counts for any Last.fm tag, which can help you find adjacent genres worth exploring.

For understanding how streaming revenue works for albums in any genre, the Streaming Royalty Calculator estimates per-stream payouts across platforms.

Albums by Genre