This might all have been said before (this is a long thread...), but a few thoughts on this and a potential workaround.
My guess is that the "Your music" features in Spotify are built on top of playlists, and that playlists are woven deep into the fabric of Spotify's apps and services. Remember that back in the day, Spotify only had playlists as a way to organise your own music. Playlists (likely) have a 10k song limit, which seems quite reasonable when you are thinking about normal playlists and how people would use them. There are probably lots of parts of Spotify that assume playlists aren't going to be bigger than 10k songs long. That's not just about an arbitrary limit, but also about how to manage memory and render the UI.
I suspect that when you "Save" an album, what actually happens is that the songs from that album (plus a dummy record for the album itself) are saved to a hidden playlist that contains all the songs in the "Your music" collection. The rest of the UI around "Your music" is just a wrapper around filtering and managing that playlist.
This would have been an easy way to implement library features and still allow things like removing tracks you don't like from a saved album, shuffling all of "your music" etc. But moving away from it now would mean either making all playlists support more tracks, or coming up with some other storage mechanism specifically for "Your music", which would be a lot more work and require some kind of conversion on upgrade of the app.
I can see why Spotify doesn't want to touch this, but it's a really disappointing position to be in. It punishes the most loyal, longest-serving users, who may grow a collection of years and then suddenly hit the ceiling (I bet few people know the ceiling exists at all). The argument about this only affecting 1% of users is also a bit disingeneous. People who reach this limit will likely leave Spotify (who needs the kind of stress that comes from having to constantly delete old albums to allow new ones to be saved?), so the number will probably not increase massively.
Anyway, there is a workaround. (Actually there are two, and my workaround is to use Apple Music...). There is no 10k limit to the total number of tracks across all your playlists, and it is still pretty easy to create a new playlist with all the songs in one particular album (an overhang from the days when that was the only way to do it).
Here's what you do:
- Follow artists you like. No songs are added to "your music" when you follow an artist. The list of artists you follow is likely a property held against your user profile.
- When you find an album you like, create a playlist for it (click the "..." circle, add to playlist, then new playlist). Don't click the "Save" oval. The new playlist will default to a playlist called "Artist name - Album name". On mobile (but not desktop as far as I can tell), you can show your playlist collection sorted by name, which means this is almost like browsing albums sorted by artist name. The downside is that with long artist names, it can be difficult to see the album name on a narrow screen!
- You can still browse by artist and then album from your "Artists" list of course, which works reasonably well if you tend to like most/all albums by the artists you like.
It turns out that if you now download a playlist for offline listening, the tracks in that playlist are added to the "Your music" songs list automatically, which will eventually creep up to the 10k limit. If this becomes a problem, you can clear it out again in bulk by shift-clicking on items in the "Your music" songs list on desktop and pressing delete/backspace. You'll then need to re-download albums, of course.
Should this be necessary? No. Is it a good solution? Arguably not. Whether you want to do it probably depends on how invested you are in Spotify and how hard it'd be for you to switch to Apple Music/Deezer/Amazon Prime Music/Google Music/Tidal/something else. For my use cases, Apple Music works better because it doesn't have the limit (and because it plays better with music I own that isn't available for streaming), even if I prefer Spotify's UI and community/curated playlists, and miss the Spotify Connect feature. YMMV.
Martin
