topic Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL in Your Library

Turn of auto play FOR REAL

aprentic — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 01:29:00 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

iPhone 8, PC

Operating System

iOS 10, Windows 11

My Question or Issue

How do I disable autoplay? I mean actually disable autoplay.
The advice of "settings->autoplay(off)" does NOT work.

Spotify still insists on taking whatever song I pick and then playing "next from" when it's done with a playlist.

How can I get Spotify to play only the songs I ask it to and then STOP.

By STOP I mean that it does not play any songs without explicit instructions to do so. It should NOT start playing songs and force me to explicitly tell it to stop.

This seems like very basic functionality. If I play a record, a tape, or CD, my devices don't decide they know better than me and start playing random songs from my collection. Why does Spotify think that's a good idea?

PS I moved this because it seems to have gotten attached to some other thread by accident.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

Yordan — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:39:23 GMT

Hey there, @aprentic,

Welcome to the Spotify Community!

When you play an album/playlist, the rest of the tracks will be queued in the Next from section of the queue. What Autoplay does is it generates a new queue of similar content when the previous one ends so that the playback doesn't stop. The content from Autoplay appears in the Next up section instead.

If you want the app to play a single song then stop, you can play it from Search. Alternatively, you can start a playlist/album/podcast episode and remove the rest of the tracks/episodes you don't want to listen to from the queue.

💡Tip: In the desktop app, you can set a filter in the playlist that only plays content that matches your query. You can access it by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the top right, or with Ctrl + F. Screenshots below:

With filter
Without filter

Hope this clears things up. In case you meant something else, feel free to elaborate further 👍

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

aprentic — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:07:41 GMT

I've seen similar advice elsewhere. Unfortunately, it doesn't fix the problem.

The problem isn't that I can't turn off a song. I'm not looking for a way to temporarily override autoplay.

I want a setting that tells Spotify NEVER to play unsolicited music.

I get that it's sometimes a useful feature. It would even be OK to have autoplay be an opt-out feature. But forcing it on people just sucks.

Please let me turn it off.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

Yordan — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:17:45 GMT

Thanks for the reply, @aprentic.

Appreciate the feedback on this. You can toggle off Autoplay in the app's settings like you mentioned in your original post, but in order to confirm we're on the same page, feel free to share a short screen recording which captures the exact behavior in action so we can get a direct view of what's happening on your end and investigate further. Make sure the queue is clearly visible on the screen recording as well 👍

If you notice that the app's playing songs that you haven't personally added, you might have Smart Shuffle toggled on. You'll find more info on how to turn it off here.

Cheers 🤘

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

aprentic — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:53:45 GMT

Here's a screen shot.

When I click "clear queue" it will only get rid of the "Next in Queue".

It will go on to play "Awarakadawara" over and over unless I explicitly tell it to stop each time. It won't even remember my preference through a single session. If I want to add multiple songs, I need to tell it NOT to keep playing random stuff every time I add a song.

What I'm looking for is a single button or setting that tells Spotify, "NEVER play a song unless I've explicitly told you to."

I have both "smart shuffle" and "autoplay" turned off.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

Novy — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:01:16 GMT

Hi @aprentic,

Thanks for getting back to us.

Have you, by any chance, put this song on repeat from a different device? If so, this could be the reason why only this song keeps being repeated outside of your queue, even if the aforementioned settings are off.

If you haven't already, try signing out from all devices, then restart the device you're currently using and log back in.

Keep us posted on how it goes!

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

aprentic — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:12:51 GMT

Sort of.

The problem started on my phone. It just "volunteered" to start autoplaying stuff.

When I switched to my desktop the problem was still there.

I tried to log out of all my other devices and the problem is still there.

When I search for a song, find it in a list and click on it, Spotify often (but not always) adds a bunch of stuff to the queue that I didn't ask for.

I'm not looking for a way to remove them. I can do that already and it's annoying.

I'm also not looking for a lot of different multi-click methods to disable some autoplay under some circumstances.

I'm looking for some setting that tells Spotify to NEVER play a song I didn't explicitly ask it to play.

Every time I ask Spotify to play a single song, or try to add a song to a queue, Spotify insists on

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

Novy — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:45:02 GMT

Hey again @aprentic,

We understand where you're coming from and appreciate all your feedback, which has been passed on to the relevant teams.

We'd recommend having a look in our Idea Exchange to see if someone else has already made a similar suggestion. If there isn't one, you can submit your own idea so that other users can also support it. The higher the number of votes an idea gets, the more likely it is for it to be implemented.

If anything else comes up, the Community will be here.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

Ndovu — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 06:53:29 GMT

I faced the same problem, I've switched off autoplay, but even when I play songs in my 'liked' folder, Spotify still plays some other random song that is not in my liked songs folder. Guys you need to fix this, if its not fixed I'd like a refund!!

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

aprentic — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 18:26:36 GMT

As Novy suggested, I opened an Idea for this:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Ability-to-turn-off-Autoplay/idi-p/6801391

Give it an upvote so they see it's something customers care about.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

dingdingwikki — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:42:56 GMT

Yes, people, please upvote the Idea.

Although it's insane that this is considered some sort of new "idea". It's just basic functionality that's currently broken.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

dingdingwikki — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 01:05:14 GMT

It's even worse than I thought. The Spotify suggested workaround is to clear the queue. But you can't.
* Literally, in the desktop app at least, there is no "Clear Queue" button, even though google seems to think there is.
* You can remove individual tracks (or select a group and then remove them as a group), but to no avail. Every time I remove tracks, it adds more. I literally needed to go through this entire Artist's discography, it added all of the tracks for each of the albums, one album at a time, before I could finally clear out the queue.
* But even then, it's not complete. There's still the single "Now playing" track that's left, and there's no way to remove it.
* As a further workaround, I tried fast forwarding the "Now playing" track until almost the end, resuming it, and letting it finish. Hoping that then I would finally have turned off auto play. Nope, as soon as it was done that, it picked another track and replaced it in "Now playing" and started playing that. So even though I don't technically have a queue now, effectively I do, b/c as soon as it should stop, it won't, and will just start playing something else.

This really is truly insane. This is basic playback functionality, and you can't even get that right.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

dingdingwikki — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 01:10:53 GMT

re: no way to clear the queue

see also https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Mobile-Multi-Select-Add-Remove-Songs-from-Music-Queue/idc-p/7079437/highlight/true#M86164

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

EjohnFR — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:38:34 GMT

Same here for podcasts, Spotify keep playing stuff after an episode end despite all options turned off. It's f annoying as soon as I find another podcast reader I'm out of**bleep**.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

EmCue — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:42:10 GMT

I'm having a similar problem. When I get in the car, Spotify just plays even if I hadn't been using the app. Auto play is off.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

mrgilbe1 — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:21:32 GMT

OK my problem appears to be that whenever I turn Autoplay off, it turns on again.

I don't have any pattern or history to this because that makes using spotify too much like work, and I'd probably rather listen to silence than have to go into 'operational regression testing mode' whenever I fire up the app.

I seem to be in an ever repeating loop of tolerating unwelcome songs intruding on my carefully curated playlists, finally getting sick of it, checking settings on the different spotify apps, and then turning off autoplay for the nth time.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

aprentic — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:57:22 GMT

I don't know why this was marked as a solution.

It doesn't solve the problem at all.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

Cyclonus12 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:02:52 GMT

It doesn't solve the problem because Spotify doesn't view it as a problem. You can tell from the nonsense corporate-speak non-answers with which the "moderators" have responded to this thread.

I'm on a 3 month free trial, and will most certainly not be reupping after it ends. Especially when you can disable autoplay in Youtube Music with one click, and once you turn it off, it stays off by default.

I'd consider spending an ever escalating amount per month to listen to whatever music I choose to listen to... but not to listen to what some algorithm or corporate overlord thinks I should listen to.

Re: Turn of auto play FOR REAL

dsoonidos — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:52:12 GMT

For what it's worth (and no it doesn't outright solve the initial issue), I choose the album I want and then to the queue list add one of the tracks from this literal playlist of silence:

https://open.spotify.com/album/7hgrIat2fZyDYJl1JVB01Y?si=PgxI2ci5SeaPNaWhOLuaLA

Effectively I can listen to an album to the end and enjoy the silence after like it were a CD or vinyl record.