Track Relinking

The availability of a track depends on the country registered in the user’s Spotify profile settings. Often Spotify has several instances of a track in its catalogue, each available in a different set of markets. This commonly happens when the track the album is on has been released multiple times under different licenses in different markets.

These tracks are linked together so that when a user tries to play a track that isn’t available in their own market, the Spotify mobile, desktop, and web players try to play another instance of the track that is available in the user’s market.

If your application supplies a market parameter in its call to the following track endpoints, the Web API will attempt to return information about alternative tracks that are available in the specified market:

• Get a Track
• Get Several Tracks
• Get an Album
• Get Several Albums
• Get an Album’s Tracks
• Get a Playlist’s Tracks
• Get a User’s Saved Tracks

When using the market query parameter, the response will contain another instance of the tracks only if the original track is unavailable and other instances of the track are available.

For example, the track “Heaven and Hell” by William Onyeabor is not available in the United States (market code US), as shown by the request to retrieve the track’s metadata:

If a market query parameter specifying the US market is appended to the call, the Web API recognizes that the specified track is unplayable and instead returns information about a track that is playable in the specified market. In addition it returns information about the original track:

There are a number of important differences between the response you get with and without the market query parameter.

When the market parameter is supplied:

• The available_markets property in the Track object is replaced by the is_playable property. (Since the request contains the market query parameter, there’s no need for the available_markets property to determine if the user can play the track or not.)
• If the track has been relinked, the response contains a linked_from object containing information about the original track. In the example above, the track that was requested had the Spotify URI spotify:track:6kLCHFM39wkFjOuyPGLGeQ. Since it’s been relinked, this original track URI can be found in the linked_from object. The parent track object now contains metadata about the relinked track with URI spotify:track:6ozxplTAjWO0BlUxN8ia0A.
• If the is_playable property is false, the original track is not available in the given market, and Spotify did not have any tracks to relink it with. The track response will still contain metadata for the original track, and a restrictions object containing the reason why the track is not available: "restrictions" : {"reason" : "market"}.
• If the is_playable property is true, the linked_from object may or may not exist depending on whether the original track was available in the market. If the linked_from object exists, the original track has been relinked.

Valid market query parameter values are ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, as well as from_token. If from_token is used, an access token tied to a user must be supplied; from_token is the same thing as setting the market parameter to the user’s country.