That might be explained as guarding their information, yet I still have trouble believing that they are unable to distinguish two artists with the same name from each other. Each week, my Release Radar playlist is basically invaded by 0 listener rappers who "feat" defunct 70s rock bands who do not manage their artist pages... Response from Spotify: please report them individually, from the desktop app.

That's some interesting product hacking in a way.

I've run into artist naming collisions enough to know it's a thing but I've never seen anyone (ab)use it intentionally..

Neat, but still annoying I'm sure. =)

this. They don't even do an exact string match of the artist name, the reason why I can't fathom. I could make a new artist account named "drake" (lowercase d) today and probably show up in a million Release Radar playlists by next week.

This is one of the reasons why I still keep using lastfm. Stats in Spotify are next to useless and even then it would not track my local listening.

You can, to some extent, using the play history API. https://output.jsbin.com/ribat

this is a massive gripe of mine. I remember being able to toggle so many stats in itunes back in the day which gave me such great insight into my listening habits and other cool tidbits. Spotify, for all its ease of listening has removed some of the magic there