Songs not playing on my phone

[nicolodignazio]

Plan

Premium Student

Country

Italy

Device

Samsung Galaxy S8

Operating System

Android 9

My Question or Issue

Hi everyone! A few days ago, I've started having a problem with Spotify on my phone. Every time I try to play a song, it simply won't start, even if I try to start the song from a different point on the progress bar. However, I can still play songs on my laptop, TV, and Alexa device. I already have:

• cleared the cache (from both Spotify settings and Settings > Apps > Spotify);
• logged out;
• uninstalled Spotify (from both Google Play Store and Setting > Apps > Spotify);
• deleted every com.spotify.music file;
• rebooted my phone;
• disconnected every connected device from Spotify settings;
• reinstalled Spotify;
  

and it still doesn't work. I'm starting to get frustrated. I don't know what else to do.

[Ivan]

Hey @sflwt2003 and @Dcy1, 

Thanks for keeping us in the loop. 

Great news! Give us a shout if you experience this again - we're always here to help.

Еnjoy your music! 

[mhi-24f2u9_er]

Hi,

I'm having a similar issue to @nicolodignazio except Spotify only breaks like this when I set the storage to SD Card. The SD Card is brand new with nothing else on it, songs are downloading but they won't play, my username appears as numbers without a profile picture, it doesn't show that I've liked a song and my liked songs playlist disappears from my library.

I have:

• performed the clean install
• cleared the cache and data several times
• uninstalled and reinstalled Spotify several times
• logged out and logged back in
• rebooted my phone
• logged out of all my devices
• SD card is formatted as portable storage
• SD card has all required permissions

I did not find any of the com.spotify.music folders after uninstalling it. Spotify is also working perfectly on my laptop and desktop, it just seems to be an issue when the storage is set to SD on my phone.

I have a Sony Xperia L2, Android 7.1.1 with Spotify version 8.5.93.445. I'd really appreciate some help since I bought the SD Card so I could put the music on it as it fills up my internal storage too quickly.

[Alex]

Hi there @mhi-24f2u9_er,

Thanks for the info.

Can you try to format the card as internal storage and reinstall Spotify? After that check whether you can see the SD card as a storage option from the Spotify App settings.

Keep us posted.

[mhi-24f2u9_er]

Thanks for the response.

I don't seem to have the option to format the SD as internal. When I tap format, it only says portable storage.

Now both options are greyed out on Spotify. I have made no changes.

[Alex]

Hi @mhi-24f2u9_er,

Thanks for getting back to us.

If the SD-card is formatted as internal storage the app will treat it as space on the phone's internal memory and will start writing data to it once the phone's storage is filled up. 

If the card is formatted as portable storage you should be able to choose it as an storage option for the Spotify downloads. 

It might be worth checking if your phone runs normally with another SD card or running this on through some software that can check it for errors on your computer.

Keep us posted on how you get on with this.

[mhi-24f2u9_er]

My previous SD card had the same issue with Spotify so I was storing all the music internally.

Have run my new SD card through Windows error checking and it has found no errors. No issues with copying things over onto it either.

[Novy]

Hi again @mhi-24f2u9_er,

Thanks for your reply.

Keep in mind that older Android versions can cause the app to malfunction when using an SD card.

In this case, could you try using a device that has a newer Android version to see if you can replicate this issue?

Let us know how it goes. 

[mhi-24f2u9_er]

Unfortunately, I don't have access to a phone with a later version of Android. If I could just get one that would be great, but it'll have to wait.

My boyfriend is running Spotify on a phone with the same version of Android and uses the SD card for storage without issue. It's an LG though. I understand that it could be the device so I'll try to reset it to factory settings and get back to you.

[Ivan]

Hey @mhi-24f2u9_er, 

Hope you're doing well. 

Jumping in here just to check if you managed to see any difference after resetting your device to factory settings. 

Let us know and we'll be here to assist you further if necessary. 

Enjoy your day!  

[mhi-24f2u9_er]

Hi @Ivan

I did try and factory reset my device. It didn't work.

I've performed clean reinstalls of the app numerous times, checked my SD card several times, tried to log in with a different account all to no avail.

I also managed to try replicate the issue on another phone and everything worked fine there. There was no hassle with playback or issues with it showing my display name or liked songs. No problems with downloading songs onto the SD card either.

I've just downloaded Spotify Lite and it works without issue as well, so I might just continue using it for now. Could there be some issue with the way the Spotify app reads and writes data on the SD card? I'd enabled storage permissions for it but it didn't seem to help.

[Eni]

Hi @mhi-24f2u9_er, 

Thanks for letting us know that. 

Could you let us know the exact make/model, operating system and Spotify version of the other device you tried with?

Also, do you have any cache-clearing apps that cleans your phone's cache everyday ? If so, we'd suggest adding Spotify to the exception list.

We'll be on the lookout for your reply 🙂

[EduV69]

So I landed in this thread after having the exact same problem for the second time.

Last time it worked after a clean install.

This time, after clearing caches and force stop the app I simply tried to log out and log back in and it just worked for some reason...

So if this is happening I guess you could try to log out and back in again before anything else and see if it works.

Hope this can be helpful

[Indemik_RU]

Starting having this issue tonight too (Android 12). Got fixed when I clean reinstalled the app.

[avekaria]

I have finally found the solution for certain song not playing on my android phone.

For some reason a few artist were set to do not play this. See attached pictures

Hope this helps. 

[Etozero]

At first I just had to press the song a bunch and it would finally start playing. But then after a while that stopped working. 

Then I would go to the album the song was on, play it for 10 seconds, then come back to my library and click it and it would work. (I like to go through my library by title so it matters that I play the song from there.) But even this after a while stopped working. 

NOW I found another method, hit shuffle then click the song then shuffle then song, over and over until it plays. You shouldn't have to do the combo move more than 20 times. Usually it works for me in less than 10. Insane but it works. Hope this helps. 

[Hankster65]

Signed up for Spotify last night on my PC and all was great.  Today I hit the spinning wheel problem on my Samsung Android phone.  Tried EVERYTHING!  No luck.

Then I removed the SD card, reinstalled Spotify,  and much to amazement it WORKED!  I put the SD card back in my phone and it still works.  I have no idea why but I'm very happy this simple little procedure did the trick.  

[chisomaka]

Hello 👋, did creating a new account fix the problem?