I’ve been using Apple Music API for quite a while now and a recent change must have happened which is quite disruptive.
On many occasions, artists release singles from an album as part of promoting this album. For recent examples, Harry Styles released “Aperture” (a single) to promote his upcoming album “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally“. Similarly, Bruno Mars released “I Just Might”, a single from the upcoming album “The Romantic”.
Previously, those would return at the endpoint ”artists/{artist_id}/albums” with a “- Single” suffix. But it seems a recent change happens where they only appear as playable tracks inside the album.
This behavior is also evident in the Apple Music app itself. Those singles no longer appear under “Singles & EPs”. Instead, they would only be visible if the single becomes popular enough to be shown on “Top Songs“. Otherwise one would have to know to tap on the (future) album to discover if there are released singles.
Meanwhile Spotify’s API returns those as singles properly, just like Apple Music API used to.
This change must be recent but the question is if it’s intentional, and if so, how can the API be used from here on out to “extract” those singles and represent them?