topic Re: Artist name inconsistently not shown in Japanese and can't be searched in Content Questions

Stop the translations

kurodouble — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 03:07:09 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Malaysia

My Question or Issue

Even my Spotify and whole system is in Japanese, Spotify decides to translate Japanese title into English. I don't need this kind of useless translation.
Even worse, while Spotify decides to translate the Japanese title to English, it also translates those Artist name which originally in English or Chinese into Japanese.
Why do you even do that???
Either make an option to disable it or just disable the translation. It's annoying and meaningless.

Re: Stop the translations

Vasil — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:11:39 GMT

Hey @kurodouble,

Thanks for taking your time to post on the forum 🙂

Spotify uses some of the the localized titles from the release metadata, which we get from the distributors. The language can differ depending on a few factors, including the system settings and what info we have available. With this being said, we do appreciate what you've shared with us and we'll make sure to forward this info.

Note: The idea post you've published on the Community is a great way to voice your opinion! Make sure to share it with your peers.

We're here for you in case there's anything else in the meantime.

Artist name inconsistently not shown in Japanese and can't be searched

Toshiki — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:52:54 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

Surface Laptop Studio, Pixel 9a

Operating System

Windows 11, Android 16.

My Question or Issue

I set the language for both the apps on PC and Android to Japanese in order to get Japanese artists' name untranslated. It only works for some artists but it's better than nothing. Today I found that some artists show Japanese only on Android, but not PC. The same songs in a playlist show different names on PC and Android.

Examples are:

牛尾憲輔
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4L0gz16xuM1as1OgYzh1SR

and

上原ひろみ

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7DeuppKQdCVhuWrzzCBBpc

There are probably more examples. The names of both of the artists show in Japanese in private window when the language was switched to Japanese.

The problem doesn't stop here. In fact, even if the artists' names are shown in Japanese on Android, if I search the Japanese name in my liked songs playlist, it doesn't show up, but it shows up if it's in other user-created playlists. This is true for both PC and Android. What's more, if I click into the artists' page it shows the name in the original, but if I then click into the liked songs from this artist, then it shows translated names.

Actually, there's more. I observed that sometime for a brief moment, the names on PC will go to Japanese, but it will go back to the translated one after a short time. It will also go to the translated one if you play the song.

It's really confusing and a mess. What I want is for Spotify to just respect my language settings and show the names in Japanese, or, at the very least, be consistent. With the recent issue of artists name replace with "cleaned", it seems that spotify is having a lot of problems with Japanese artists. Please fix them.

Re: Artist name inconsistently not shown in Japanese and can't be searched

Toshiki — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 01:37:59 GMT

My post titled "Artist name inconsistently not shown in Japanese and can't be searched" was merged by mods with this post, but they are about different things. This post talks about an improvement of stopping translations in general, which I also want, but my post is more about a bug of inconsistent behavior.

It's not that the artists' names are not translated at all, it's that they are untranslated on the phone but not on PC. And over the past few days, I observed that even on PC they sometimes shows the original Japanese, sometimes they show Japanese after playing the song or go the the artist page, and sometimes they don't show the original at all.

Therefore, I think my post should be restored as it talks about a different issue. And I ask the mods to report the bug for the engineers to fix.

Re: Artist name inconsistently not shown in Japanese and can't be searched

Vasil — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:14:34 GMT

Hey @Toshiki,

Apologies about the confusion here and thank you for the clarification 🙂

In general, it is up to the artist how they chose to upload their name and what alternative languages they include in the metadata. Note that there are some changes currently happening backstage that may have caused some temporary issues, which is why our advice in this situation would be to keep your app up to date and monitor this behaviour.

In case the inconsistencies continue and you manage to spot how to consistently reproduce them, do let us know in this thread.
Much appreciated!