Backbone.js Collection of Collections

You'd solve your problem by turning your Playlist from a collection into a model. If you think about it, a Playlist would probably have other attributes anyway (e.g. name) that wouldn't be settable on a collection.

Playlists would then be a collection of Playlist models (instead of collections), which should work without error.

var Track = Backbone.Model.extend({
    //trackdata
});

var Playlist = Backbone.Model.extend({
    model : Track
});

var Playlists = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    url   : "playlists",
    model : Playlist
});