DevilScrapes
Spotify Podcast Guest Graph Scraper icon

Lead generation · Marketing

Spotify Podcast Guest Graph Scraper

Extract a structured guest-history graph from Spotify podcast episodes via the Spotify API — episode metadata plus NLP-detected guest names, roles, and confidence scores — export to JSON or CSV. Uses your own Spotify Developer credentials; metadata only, no audio.

Run it on Apify ↗ See input & output

Free Apify credit covers a first run. No credit card to try.

What this Actor scrapes

Spotify publishes every show's episode list at api.spotify.com/v1/shows/{id}/episodes. This Actor authenticates with your Spotify Developer credentials, pages through episodes for one or more shows, runs spaCy + regex over each episode description, and emits one row per episode × guest pair — name, inferred role (host / cohost / guest), and a confidence score. The result is a clean, exportable podcast guest database ready for research, lead-gen, or AI training pipelines.

What we handle for you

  • 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the endpoint sees a browser, not Python.
  • 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block or rate-limit response.
  • 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
  • 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down and surface partial progress rather than going silent.
  • 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
  • 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

Use cases

  • Podcast guest research — build a podcast guest database of who has appeared on which shows to find cross-show patterns and booking opportunities.
  • Booking agencies — surface guests that match a target podcast's profile to pitch your client into similar shows; replaces hours of manual research.
  • Media intel — track when a public figure (CEO, author, researcher) makes podcast appearances; export a podcast guest list for any show in seconds.
  • Entity-graph AI training — feed (person, show, date) triples into a knowledge graph for downstream ML or recommendation systems.
  • Journalists — quickly trace a person's recent podcast circuit to map their messaging and audience reach.
  • Founder-led PR — research which shows align with your topic before you pitch, using real guest history data rather than guessing.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

FieldTypeRequiredWhat it does
show_ids array no List of 22-character Spotify show IDs (the bit after `/show/` in any open.spotify.com URL). Provide this OR `showSearchQuery`.
showSearchQuery string no Free-text query passed to /v1/search. The top-matching show is used. Ignored when `showIds` is set.
maxEpisodesPerShow integer no Newest episodes first. Hard cap 200.
clientId string yes From your Spotify Developer Dashboard application (https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard). Required.
clientSecret string yes From the same Spotify Developer application. Required. Stored as an Apify Secret — never logged.
market string no Country code used for availability filtering on Spotify episode endpoints. 
{
  "show_ids": [
    "2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL"
  ],
  "maxEpisodesPerShow": 3,
  "clientId": "your_client_id_here",
  "clientSecret": "your_client_secret_here",
  "market": "US",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

show_idshow_nameepisode_idepisode_nameepisode_release_dateepisode_duration_msguest_nameguest_roleconfidenceepisode_urlscraped_at 

{
  "show_id": "2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL",
  "show_name": "Lex Fridman Podcast",
  "episode_id": "5kF8w2Q9pNeLBxXxNH1mxJ",
  "episode_name": "#412 \u2014 Demis Hassabis: AGI and the Future of AI",
  "episode_release_date": "2026-04-30",
  "episode_duration_ms": 9384210,
  "guest_name": "Demis Hassabis",
  "guest_role": "guest",
  "confidence": 0.92,
  "episode_url": "https://open.spotify.com/episode/5kF8w2Q9pNeLBxXxNH1mxJ",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-16T12:00:00Z"
}

Pricing

EventPriceWhen
Actor start$0.20Once per run, covers warm-up and proxy session setup.
Result emitted$0.0050Per result written to the dataset.

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

FAQ

Why do I need a Spotify client_id and client_secret?
Spotify's Web API requires OAuth 2.0 — even for public catalog data. Creating a free app on the Spotify Developer Dashboard takes about 60 seconds: https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard. The Actor uses the client_credentials grant, which gives it read-only access to the public catalog and never touches any user account. Your credentials stay encrypted in Apify Secrets.
Are episode transcripts included?
No. Spotify does not expose transcripts via the public Web API; downloading episode audio would violate Spotify's Terms of Service. This Actor is metadata-only — episode title, description, release date, plus NLP-extracted guest names from the description text.
How accurate is the guest extraction?
The Actor first sweeps regex patterns common in podcast show notes (with guest X, interview with X, #412 — X, etc.) at confidence 0.85–1.00. It then falls back to spaCy's en_core_web_sm PERSON entity recognizer at confidence 0.55–0.75. Each row carries its confidence score — filter on confidence >= 0.8 for high-precision research.
Can I export a podcast guest list to CSV or Excel?
Yes. Once the run completes, go to Storage → Dataset in the Apify Console and click Export. JSON, CSV, and Excel are all supported. You can also fetch the full dataset via the Apify API with your token — useful for piping directly into Clay, Apollo, or your CRM.
What if a show is in a language other than English?
Regex patterns are English-only in v1. The spaCy NER fallback still surfaces PERSON entities but with reduced accuracy on non-English text. Multi-language NLP is planned for v2 — open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab with your language to upvote.
Why is one row sometimes emitted with `guest_name: null`?
If no guest can be extracted (solo episode or sparse description), the Actor still emits a single host-role row so the episode metadata is preserved in your dataset — useful for downstream joins. The confidence field is 0.0 in this case.
How large can a podcast guest database run get?
The hard cap is 200 episodes per show. A show with 200 episodes averaging 2–3 guests per episode yields up to 600 rows at roughly $3.00. For multi-show runs, results stream in real time so you can monitor progress and stop early if needed.

Ready to run it?

Open the listing on Apify, paste the input above, and watch rows land. If it ever breaks, it is our problem before it is yours.

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