The /tracks endpoint has traditionally accepted an
order parameter for ordering results by either creation
date or ‘hotness’. The method for calculating a tracks ‘hotness’ has
never been clearly explained, but generally speaking is based on
the number of likes and listens a track receives.
Recently we started to experience problems with the query that returns tracks ordered by hotness. In the past weeks, these problems started to effect and even cause outages for API users.
We have decided that the best way forward is to remove this parameter.
Starting soon, GET requests to the /tracks
endpoint will ignore the order parameter and default to
ordering by creation date.
In the future, we look forward to releasing support for more stable
and idiomatic search and order parameters. In the meantime, it is
still possible to approximate the result sets previously returned by
specifying order=hotness by manually sorting the returned
tracks by a combination of favoritings\_count and
playback\_count.