Restoring your music preferences after being hacked

[Cpow]

Plan

Premium

Country

 Uk

iphone 7

My Question or Issue

 My spotify account was hacked. I have changed my password and forced it to sign out everywhere but the person who hacked my account listened to a lot of music that is not to my taste and now my daily reccomendations/discover weekly is all messed up. Is there a way to get it back to what I like/delete the music I didn’t listen to?

[Loxer]

Hey @Cpow, welcome to the Community.

Hope you're doing great!

Just listen to the Radio Station or your Daily Mix or your Discover Weekly playlists to give feedback on them so Spotify can offer you with a more accuracy the music you like to listen to 🙂

You can't revert that but you can just give thumbs down and use the stop sign in these places to get rid of his music taste and replace it with yours.

Hope it helps! 🙂

[Cpow]

Hello

thanks for replying and helping me.

do you also know if you can get your playlists back if the hacker deleted them? 

Thanks again

[Loxer]

Hey @Cpow, 

Sure you can! 🙂

Just go to your Spotify account page and click on Recover Playlists in the left panel.

Follow the steps from the image below.

Hope it helps 🙂

2

[Meijer1973]

I have a similar problem. I did this to myself though. I tried listening to my own genre (metal), but this only partly solved the problem. After six months I still have two mixes (one with pop and one piano). They just wont go away. 

I tried banning all the artists. Just kept clicking do not play this artist. But this does not help. I still have a mix based on lady gaga. But the mix does not contain lady gaga because I banned it (weird !).

Another problem is that the daily mixes seem to favor some (popular) artists. I listen a lot to bands that are not popular. Listening a few times to a popular artist like Adele can affect your mixes very fast. Listening to less popular bands takes a lot of hours to have an effect on your mixes.

I even have a playlist that has artists that appear to be invisible to the algoritm. My listening history of the past 30 days had no effect at all on my mixes. 

[Cpow]

Yeah same despite trying to resolve this by liking more of my own stuff and blocking things I don’t like Spotify obviously has a preference or believes I do for the artists the hacker listened to which are more mainstream than my own music tastes so my number one playlist is always the ‘hacker playlist’. It really bugs me!!

[Guido]

Hey @Cpow and @Meijer1973,

Alternatively you can think about creating a new account. Make sure you put all songs you want to keep in one or more public playlists so you can visit your old account with your new account and grab all the music from there. This is easy if you are on a desktop computer because you can drag over all the contents from a playlist into another playlist. You can visit your old account by putting the following string in the search bar:

spotify:user:username

Don't forget to replace username with your own username. If you want to use the same email address for your new account, you'll have to close your old account. You'll have 7 days to visit your old account and find your music there. You can read here how to close an account.

Hope that works for you. Let us know if you have further questions.

Have a nice day!

[Meijer1973]

I think wiping your listening history is a good idea. I do wish there would be an easier option to do this. 

My question is, can I do this with my premium account? I can make a new account. But that one would not be premium. Billing of my premium account is done by a third party (my internet/phone provider). This a package deal. 

If I would try this, it would eventually work. But I do think it would be a lot of work. Getting the billing to a new account. Stop the payments on the old account etc. I would rather have the ability to delete all or part of my listening history (like with netflix). 

[Meijer1973]

Tried disliking artists this with a playlist. I disliked every artist in it untill it was empty. It then filled up with artists completly unknown to me. But it is still here. Even after six months of not listening to the mix or any related artist. 

See the images below. Daily mix 6 has pop artists in it. I disliked a lot of them. The content changed (second image), but the mix is still there. I have not listened to these artists in six months. And even then it was only a few times. 

[Katerina]

Hey there @Meijer1973,

Thanks for getting back in touch with this.

First things first, it seems like the ability to reset your music profile is a popular idea that you can add your +VOTE  here. You can also leave a comment and contribute to the conversation.

Further, if you'd like to create a new account, you can follow the instructions here in order to cancel your subscription on your last one. Once your current account has reverted to Free, you should be able to  upgrade from your new account once more. 

Hope this helps!

[Meijer1973]

Thanks, I voted for the clear history. The new account is too much of a hassle. It will probably disappear soon I hope.