Playlist tracks disappearing with no notifiation... extremely annoying

[Redgis]

Hello Spotify staff,

Here is something that should be changed/improved in spotify.

I have a spotify unlimited account. It sometimes happens that some titles that have been available so far are suddenly not available anymore. I have three points about that.

1. I don't understand why you are doing this : I guess you had an agreement with the rights owner of such titles BEFORE you put them online, right ? So what ? The agreement gots somehow broken ?
2. To me, it's a huge annoyance, to have a title that you love in your playlist that suddenly becomes unreadable.
3. The worst is that spotify does not tell you anything about it! You simply get an error "Connection error. Please retry (802)". Spotify wouldn't tell you the title is not available anymore.

In my case, I was peacefully listening to one of my playlists. Spotify stopped. I discovered there was an error message "Connection error. Pease retry. (802)". Ok, let's retry later. When retrying I couldn't get the title to be played. Somehow I clicked on the album link. And that when I saw that the title was now in darker color, indicating it is not available.

"Seriously !?" I said to my self.

The worst is, after restarting  spotify the title striclty disapeared from my playlist. Great ! So if the title ever comes back online I will have to go seek it again and re-add it to my playlist ? How convenient ...

Do something about that, and avoid title sudden unavailabilty, 'cause that annoyes your customers off.

Edit: about the titles disapearance from playlists, just hidden (there is an option in spotify preferences "hide unavailable tracks".

[Jude]

I'll try to answer your questions. Although you'll have to bear in mind that rights holder agreements are varied, complicated, and I certainly don't know all the details.

1. I don't understand why you are doing this : I guess you had an agreement with the rights owner of such titles BEFORE you put them online, right ? So what ? The agreement gots somehow broken ?

There are agreements, of course, but there are various rights holders for each recording. They retain some rights. In fact, music can become unavailable for a number of reasons - change of distribution, for instance. Sometimes, the tracks have simply been renamed, and Spotify has been unable to re-link. It's always worth a quick search, although I can't guarantee anything in this case.

2. To me, it's a huge annoyance, to have a title that you love in your playlist that suddenly becomes unreadable.

It's annoying for everyone. We hope that this will happen less and less as the streaming model matures.

3. The worst is that spotify does not tell you anything about it! You simply get an error "Connection error. Please retry (802)". Spotify wouldn't tell you the title is not available anymore.

Error 802 is quite new. It shouldn't be related to track unavailability. It is usually related to a slow server response. This may be caused when a track has to be taken down in a hurry (perhaps it was submitted in error). In this kind of situation, the track can appear to be in the index when it isn't actually available.

The worst is, after restarting  spotify the title striclty disapeared from my playlist. Great ! So if the title ever comes back online I will have to go seek it again and re-add it to my playlist ?

Actually, the track is only hidden. If it returns, it will reappear all by itself.

You can choose to view hidden tracks in playlists:

Preferences > Playback

[Redgis]

Thanks for taking time to answer my questions. Hope these problems will not happen too often indeed.