Playlists

Playlists are an ordered collection of tracks, unlike Radio Stations, which have no fixed order and don't expose their full tracklist. Tuned Global's playlist APIs cover the complete spectrum: from editorially curated collections your team builds in the CMS, to fully user-authored playlists your listeners create, reorder, and share from directly inside your app.

Two ways a playlist comes to life

Every playlist on the platform falls into one of two models. The table below explains these and their use cases.

Only ​User​ ​and Verified playlists are writable through the API. ​System​ ​playlists are authored and maintained in the Tuned CMS. Both playlist types share the same ​read​ ​endpoints (get details, list tracks, check favourite counts), so a single integration handles editorial and user-generated content side by side without any special-casing.

Under the hood there's more nuance than a strict binary, which shows up as a ​Type​ ​on every playlist:

Platform capabilities at a glance

Full lifecycle for user-authored playlists: step-by-step

• Step 1 : Create a playlist.​ Call ​Create Playlist​ to make a new empty playlist for the authenticated user, setting the title, description, and public/private visibility. The response returns the new playlist ID you'll use in every step that follows.
• Step 2 : Add tracks.​ Use ​Add Tracks​ to append one or more track IDs to the playlist, or Replace Track List to set the entire tracklist in a single call. Tracks are stored in order, so the sequence you send is the sequence listeners will hear.
• Step 3 : Update the playlist image and description.​ Call Edit Playlist Metadata to update the title, description, and visibility, then Upload Playlist Cover to set custom cover art (supported per language). Use Delete Playlist Cover if you need to remove artwork and fall back to the default.
• Step 4 : Reorder tracks.​ Call Move a Track to change a track's position within the playlist, adjusting the listening flow without rebuilding the whole list.
• Step 5 : Delete tracks or the playlist.​ Use Remove a Track to take an individual track out, or Clear Track List to empty it while keeping the playlist intact. To remove the playlist altogether, call Delete Playlist.

Precise track & tracklist control

• Add one or more tracks in a single call
• Remove an individual track
• Replace the entire tracklist in one call
• Clear every track while keeping the playlist itself
• Move a track to a new position (reorder without rebuilding the list)
• Every track carries its own position, added-date, and updated-date, so clients can build drag-and-drop reordering and "recently added" views without extra bookkeeping

Rich, localized media

• Name, description, and cover art all support ​per-language values​ out of the box — one playlist, many locales
• Upload or remove custom cover art independently of the default artwork
• Native support for both audio and video playlists

Discovery & personalization

• Browse all published playlists for a store, or just what's trending
• Look up playlists by track (“what playlists contain this song?”), by verified user, or by tag
• Personalized feeds driven by a listener's onboarding tag preferences, including a trending view scoped to a specific tag type
• Full-text playlist search and artist-linked playlists (surfaced via the Search and Artists APIs)
• Personalized playlist recommendations for the current user
• Quick discovery signals — explicit-content flag and favourite count — without fetching the full object

User context & personal library

• A dedicated per-user context endpoint returns play count, last-played time, and whether the playlist is already saved to the listener's collection — kept separate from the shared playlist resource itself
• Listeners can favourite and collect playlists they didn't create, building a personal library out of both System and User playlists

Content governance

• Explicit-content flagging
• Content tiering (​Tier0 ​/ ​Tier1 ​/ ​Tier2​)​ to align playlist access with your subscription/package entitlements
• Language-restricted playlists, for catalogues that need to scope content by market.

Distribution

• Download a playlist to cloud storage — useful for offline distribution (background music and airline use cases) or downstream processing pipelines

Admin & curation tooling (CMS)

• Look up any playlist by ID as an admin, independent of its normal visibility rules — built for internal curation review
• Add or remove tags on a playlist administratively, which is what powers tag-based browsing and personalized "for you" surfaces for listeners

Built on two purpose-built APIs

Playlist data is split across two APIs by access pattern, not by feature:

• Metadata API​ - anonymous, public catalogue reads (store + country only, no user token). Use it for discovery surfaces, editorial features, and anything you'd like to cache or serve from a CDN.
• Services API​ - authenticated, OAuth-scoped. Use it for anything that belongs to a specific logged-in user: their own playlists, their library, their personalized feeds.

A public playlist page and a "my playlists" screen call the same underlying playlist model — you're simply choosing the API that matches who's asking.

Related capabilities elsewhere in the docs

Playlists connect into several other parts of the API:

• Favouriting & library​ - save a playlist to a user's collection (​User Library & Collection​ section)
• Personalized recommendations​ - algorithmic playlist suggestions for a user (​Users → Personalisation and Recommendations​)
• Tag-based browsing​ - discover playlists by tag (​Tags​ section)
• Artist-linked playlists​ - playlists associated with a specific artist (​Artists​ section)
• Full-text search​ - find playlists by keyword (​Search​ section)