Tons of music suddenly unavailable after using local files on Windows

[user-removed]

My Question or Issue

After trying to play three or so local audio files (Windows 10), many, many tracks are now grayed out. I realize that the app may have blocked local files that it for some reason detected as being illegitimately obtained, but Spotify on all platforms is blocking non-local music that wasn't ever in my local files anyway. Like for example, all of To **bleep** a Butterfly is blocked for me, even though none of the songs from that album were in my local files. Other albums have only a few songs blocked.

Some of my local files were duplicated even though I had deleted those duplicate files on my device (I've seen threads on this site mentioning that the app caches those file names even after deletion), and I think I may have tried playing some of them because I couldn't tell which ones I had deleted and which I hadn't. Maybe that had something to do with things showing up as unavailable?

Even if this is related to my local files, why is Spotify blocking non-local content seemingly chosen at random? And is this a temporary or permanent thing?

Plan

Free

Country

United States

[Lyubka · Accepted solution]

Hey @user-removed,

Thank you for reaching out here in the Community!

There are a few possible reasons as to why a song might show as grayed out and give an error when tried to be played.

Some songs are not available in all countries, and this is due to license agreements with the rights holders. We're always working on expanding our catalog, so if that's the case for your songs we hope you'll see them available soon.

Another option is that the songs you see are marked as Explicit and you have that type of content filtered off. You can read more about that here.

It's also possible that the songs were marked as "Don't play this'' at some point - and if that's the case you can follow the steps here to unmark them.

Lastly, you've mentioned that you've deleted some duplicate files on your device. You might have deleted the files that now are showing as unavailable and this also might be the reason why you can't play them.
 

Hope this clear things up,

Cheers! 

[user-removed]

Yeah, it was the explicit content filter. I guess I must have accidentally turned it off when I messed with my local file settings. Boy do I feel silly now