Disappearing albums

[jens-leeuw]

Hi!
Recently I noticed some of my favorite albums disappearing from Spotify. For example; Trouble and Gossip in the grain from Ray Lamontagne. Does anybody know what the reason for this is and are they coming back? I stream from The Netherlands.
Thanks 🙂

[osornios · Accepted solution]

Hey @jens-leeuw

The availability of music on Spotify is up to the artists and their music label.

If the music is gone, the artist or their music label has likely decided to remove it from Spotify. 

Sometimes the music is only available in certain countries, while access is blocked to others.

Keep in mind that if an album or song is unavailable temporarily, it's likely to come back again.

Contacting the artist is a good way to let them know you miss their music in Spotify.

More info here. 🙂

[blugosi]

I have just discovered that these two Albums are no longer available in Greece either...

[ComradeCanuck]

Do these links work for you?

[blugosi]

@ComradeCanuck, 

No, they don't.

Clicking on "Trouble" a new window opens and a song called "Know Nothing" by Travis starts playing.

Funny thing is that these older albums are not available on Deezer either.

I have sent an email message to Sony Music asking why these albums are no longer available, no reply yet.

[ComradeCanuck]

Weird. This is the link to the artist:

and I'll attach a screenshot of all the albums that display available to me. As you will see, Spotify doesn't actually make the album "Gossip In The Grain" available to me. I located links that go directly to those albums via alternate methods. 

I just checked both of the "Gossip In The Grain" albums, one is a deluxe version with 15 tracks, the other the regular album with 10. When I try to play songs from them, on the regular 10 track version it only actually plays two tracks, "Let It Be Me" and "Winter Birds". On the deluxe album it only plays three tracks, the two above as well as "Trouble".

I started looking into the issue of albums disappearing as I found a playlist with tracks on it that wouldn't play for me and I started digging around and was able to locate links to albums that were no longer made available, but I didn't realize that not all the songs there wouldn't work.

I have a strong suspicion that these albums being made unavailable are due to licencing agreements that are often country specific. So since I'm in Canada, whoever has the licencing for the Trouble album here has made an agreement with Spotify to have it accessible here but whoever has the licensing agreement in the Netherlands has revoked the agreement with Spotify if the album had been available and is no longer.

[blugosi · Accepted solution]

You are probably right.

Copyright schemes can be very elaborate, especially when an artist signs with a new record label, like Ray Lamontage did in our case.

This is another reason I will stick to my own collection on vinyl and hard disk!

Who knows how the big names will handle streaming licensing aggrements in the future. 

I've always thought that resord labels must have been piffed off with the illegal download frenzy of the 90s and that they would find their way to get even with us. Maybe they plan to wait until we all have music on the cloud only, and then demand impossibly high premiums to offer their entire music vaults.

[Liam4eg]

When albums got deleted there happens also another problem. When the deleted albums reappear you have to sort all of those albums tracks once again, if you actually find out you are missing tunes in your playlists. Usually, it catches you by surprise, when u think you haven't heard some tunes for a long time and can't find it in your playlists. And if you have a big enough collection with hundreds of different playlists it turns in such a headache to find those missing albums and put every track in the corresponding playlist.

Maybe there is a possibility to automatically remember every track's playlist and saved tracks mark, so when album reappear, automatically put it back in its playlists and mark previously saved tracks as saved again?

[alexi2]

Girls generation albums baby baby and genie has dissapeared from spotify and I just want to know when are they coming back to spotify 

[Europe7283]

What happens if you downloaded the album and then it's removed. Does it mean it's also gone from my downloads?

[majk2610]

I have the same problem with Milk Inc.'s album - "Forever". This album is a masterpiece. The CD contains same beautiful songs as "Sunrise", "Summer Rain" and "Invisible". Some time ago I wanted to stream it, but I was really shocked, because all songs was grey..

[disc_count]

What if they remove the data of the deleted album too (like in this screenshot from one of my playlists)? Am I just SOL or is there a way to recover/track it so I know what it was?