topic Re: Album Search by Year is Broken in Content Questions

Advanced search is broken

Escombro — Wed, 21 May 2025 14:11:44 GMT

Album searches by year ("year:1978" for example) used to return hundreds of pages of results ordered by popularity, it was by far the best feature of Spotify in my opinion, now those same searches yield a miserable 50 albums in a completely random order, in other words: useless. Please fix this.

advanced search

zg14 — Mon, 30 May 2022 13:41:10 GMT

How do I do advanced search on Spotify? I want to search by playlist name and username, I tried this ones on the link https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/ but they dont work

Re: advanced search

Alex — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:12:46 GMT

Hey there @zg14,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

Finding user-created playlists via the Search option will not always yield any results. This is because the search shows you primarily playlists with a large follower count or very unique names. This is intended, since there are millions of playlists on Spotify and a lot of them have the same or very similar name.

The best thing to do is ask your friend to send you a link to their playlist. After that you can add it to your Library with the Like button 🙂

Cheers.

Advanced search operators no longer working

Peterline6 — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:23:26 GMT

Hi everyone!

It's been a couple of days that advanced search operator such as "AND" "OR" "NOT", as for the "+" / "-" stopped working for me (iOS / macOS / Windows).

It was a really convenient way for me to find new releases among a very specific range of music, but now it just considers "AND" as a word I'm searching for.

I really hope that's some bug and not a guideline change!

Cheers,

Pierre

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Alex — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 07:09:28 GMT

Hey there folks,

Thanks for the posts.

We've passed your feedback on this to the right folks at Spotify.

We tested this on our end too and it looks like, for some years, the albums do seem random at first, but they are ordered based on popularity in your country/ region as well. So you're seeing results that are most popular with other listeners from your region.

Regarding the number of albums you see. On the Desktop app when you search for a year and click on "Albums" you initially get a smaller selection, but after that, you should be able to scroll down, which would load more entries. Note that on some devices this might be a bit slower.

Hope this helps.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Peterline6 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:52:12 GMT

I would like to add that search operators are malfunctioning for days now. I can't use the advanced operator such as "AND" or "NOT" anymore.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Escombro — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 13:16:46 GMT

Hi Alex, thanks for the quick reply but i had been using this specific search for quite some time, actually it was a daily routine that i considered a part of my job (i'm a media composer), so i know exactly how it behaved and it was NOTHING like what we have now, honestly it was the one thing that made Spotify stand out for me, this being gone i might just move to the cheapest service available since NONE of these companies seem to want to provide a decent platform for deep musical research.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Peterline6 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:50:59 GMT

Couldn't agree more. Spotify is the only streaming service that allows (well, alowed) this level of granularity in search. I really hope that's just some bug and not a feature change.

Re: Advanced search operators no longer working

Peterline6 — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 09:29:38 GMT

Since my topic was merged with this one, I figured I might add in some details about what's happening.

For research purposes, I've been using advanced search operator for months, specifically in order to filter out some terms.

I'm looking for new releases in the original soundtracks category. However there's also a ton of albums titled like "original motion picture soundtrack" or "original soundtrack from the TV Series". In order to clean my results, here's what I've been using for the past months : "Original" AND "Soundtrack" -picture -tv -series year:2023 tag:new

This query right here gave me exactly what I needed: new releases with albums with exactly "Original Soundtrack" in their title that came out recently.

Now the search operators simply don't work. It considers "AND", and every term I want to exclude as part of my research. For example if I search for "Original Soundtrack" -picture (in order to exclude the albums with "picture" in the title), it doesn't exclude the word "picture" anymore.

Re: Advanced search operators no longer working

Escombro — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 14:42:05 GMT

Unfortunately nothing has changed and i haven't heard back from them, i'm already looking for alternatives, i'll let you know if i find something.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Escombro — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 14:45:37 GMT

"We tested this on our end too and it looks like, for some years, the albums do seem random at first, but they are ordered based on popularity in your country/ region as well. So you're seeing results that are most popular with other listeners from your region."

So you're telling me that this "Special Effects" album is the number 2 most popular album from 1975 in my region, right? That seems about right.

This search is just chaotic now.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Lluís — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 21:53:26 GMT

Spotify actually is useless when you try to discover new music by year! It only appears a few random albums and you cannot do a deep music research.

Please, fix this bug

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Escombro — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 13:59:46 GMT

I don't get it, for the last 2 or 3 days the search went back to basically what it was before, i was just about to post a thank you and now i see that it's gone right back to the lame 50 results, if you're trying to aggravate the users its working.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Peterline6 — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 16:18:08 GMT

This. Everything went back to normal for the past few days and now it's broken again. Urgh.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Anemo — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:34:42 GMT

One week later and operators are still broken. Any news?

Search and advanced search are broken

Anemo — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 22:22:50 GMT

For a few days I noticed that some search features are broken. I especially tested with the label filter & operators which does not behave like they did a few weeks ago.

I'm taking the example of searching albums from record label "King Records".

"label:King Records => returns 1000 results including, unrelated label "King Point Records" (and any label containing the word "king" or "records")
"label: King Records" (with a space) => returns 0 result, the search with a space was working before.
label:"King Records" NOT label:"King Point Records" => returns 0 result
label:"King Records" -label:"King Point Records" => returns 0 result

Are there any fixes planned for that?

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Peterline6 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:52:17 GMT

It’s been over a month now and it’s still hasn’t been fixed. It’s ridiculous, we can’t even use the "label" operator since you can’t combine words anymore (eg. label:laced+records don’t work unless I delete the latter part, getting less accurate results).

Please do something. Spotify is the only streaming service that allows this level of granularity in searches.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Escombro — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 22:06:30 GMT

As far as i can tell search by year right now is returning the same number of results as before only in no particular order, which makes it less useful but still better than nothing.

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

Peterline6 — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 06:13:18 GMT

Correct, but I still can’t fitter out some words with an hyphen or the "NOT" operator like I used to the past few months. Same with "AND" or "+".

Re: Album Search by Year is Broken

phat1984 — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 10:22:11 GMT

Another month has passed, advanced search is still not working properly.

My example is this: label:"relative pitch" AND year:2023. While on the "tracks" tab you can see a lot, the "album" tab shows only one album. The expectation is to see twenty-something albums.