Playlist issues

[Sagan7]

A playlist owned by someone else that I follow has a couple of songs that are unaccessible when viewed on a laptop, when I view them on a phone they are not there at all but I can access the songs fine when I search up the artists themselves.

[dinomight]

Hey @Sagan7,

Welcome to the community, and thanks for your post! It sounds like there are a couple things going on here:

• If a user has included local tracks in their playlist, they will show up grayed out for other users, just like you described. Even if the tracks are available on Spotify, they aren't automatically matched, meaning that user would need to replace their local copies of the files with the versions from the Spotify catalog in order for them to be playable to others that follow that playlist. (Note, it's also possible for songs to be unplayable and grayed out because they are not available in your region, but since you were able to search for and play them manually, that tells me it's most likely the local file issue that's happening in this case).
  
  
• The reason they would not be showing up at all for you on your phone would be that the "show unplayable songs" setting is not activated. So, if you'll just go to your settings in the mobile app and turn that on, you'll then see all songs, and the unplayable ones will be grayed out like on the desktop.

I hope that clears up some confusion, and just let me know if you still have any questions about this!

[Sagan7]

Thank you so much! One more question what does it mean to have a local file as opposed to simply just adding a song from Spotify itself? 

[dinomight]

No problem! Local files are files that a user has in their personal collection, such as mp3s that they purchased from a music service or ripped from a CD at some point. Check out this page for details on how the whole process works for importing them into Spotify in case you ever want to do that yourself!

The main reason Spotify has this feature is so that users can still listen to tracks that may not be in the streaming catalog at the time. Unfortunately, Spotify doesn't match local tracks to the catalog (this was actually a feature in the past), so you sometimes will run into the issue you originally described if someone hasn't replaced the local files in their playlists.

[wallyphobia]

Sorry its not about your topic but how can i create an article? I have an issue

[dinomight]

Hey @wallyphobia, if you'll just go to this page and select the appropriate category for your question, you should see a green button that says "start a topic" towards the top of the page above the existing topics.