Collaborative Playlists: users in different countries don't see same songs

[e2reneta]

I've set up a collaborative playlist. Spotify users from the United States, Canada, and Ireland have contributed. Through social media, in discussing the songs, we discovered that recent contributions from the Canada and Ireland users were not appearing on the U.S. users playlists. I knew what the songs were, so I added them (I'm in the U.S.)... then U.S. users could see the songs (but posted from me, not the international users). But the respective international users now see two versions of the song. I'm guessing this has to do with licensing rights that vary by country. Is there a way when posting to a collaborative playlist, to flag songs as being limited to certain countries? Or if this is too elaborate, for users in the countries where the song is not licensed, for the name of the track to appear in the list but be greyed out and not playable?

[Erika]

Hey @e2reneta and welcome to our Community!

That's right. This is down to licensing laws across in different countries. You can find all the info here: https://support.spotify.com/problems/#!/article/Content-missing.

Give us a shout if you need us again. We're just a message away 🙂

[e2reneta]

So I guessed right. But that does not solve our problem.

For other not-licensed songs (not on playlists, but on albums) I see them greyed out, but then at least I know that Spotify recognizes such a song exists, even though I can't play them.

Could such a feature be made available for collaborative playlists when users in other countries view the playlist?

Because our current workaround... and it's not really a workaround... is that we tell each other on a different app (i.e. not Spotify, so we are going to another app and giving them our data, ad dollars, etc.) what song we intended to list (so that if it is not visible, we discover it then).

Open to other workarounds.

[user-removed]

@e2reneta

Hello:

The only work around I can think of if users are following Collaborative playlists and coming up with greyed out tracks. The best thing is to create a personal archive playlist of your own of the same tracks from the Collaborative Playlist, and then look through the artist pages from your listening location to see if the greyed out music is available on another release, or at least a slightly different release of the same content that you might have that is available from your listening location to add on the Collaborative Playlist archive. As you might know, sometimes artists and labels released multiple releases to different listening regions of the world. A release from one listening region might contain greyed out tracks for other users in other listening regions, but when checking the artist page from that other users listening region, they find the same release with the content available for them and vice versus.

Spotify has gone to some lengths now to have releases from different listening regions where there are multiple releases of the same content of a particular artist link from users listening regions on the Spotify apps to the correct release that is available to them. But sometimes this still does not work out correctly, and users have to manually search for the released content from their listening region on the Spotify apps on the artist pages to find content still. Anything not found manually from the artist page directly, this just means that listening region does not currently have access to the content which is up to labels and artists to make available. 

[e2reneta]

I would love to see greyed out tracks.

The problem is, right now, that's not happening on our playlists.

If a collaborator from Canada posts a track that is not licensed for Ireland, the Ireland user just does not see a track. 

When an Irish user told me he had added a song, I could not see it on my account (United States). So I added the song he told me. The Irish user then saw two copies of a song, and deleted mine.

[user-removed]

@e2reneta

Oops scratch that idea then.

The only other way is for each user in different listening regions that have listening restriction issues on some content for those users to set up their own personal playlists. And then share the songs through social media or email or such, and then each user locates the content manually, and then adds the content when located manually to their own personal mirror archive playlist. Which seems what you posted you are already doing, somewhat. I did not realize the collaborative playlist did that like that, seems to be limited to just that type of playlist. As I can follow even curated playlist Spotify makes for different listening regions, and greyed out / not available content to me will still show in the playlist anyway, and most times I can still locate the content on Spotify with a keyword search.

I suppose one could use Google docs and allow only those from the share group with the permissions to add the individual song URI's of the content on a Google document. And then if there are any content issues or limitations, the share group of users could still manually search on Spotify from their listening region to see if the content still exists like I posted previously, and then add the found content to a personal mirror archive playlist of what others in the group are sharing.