Invisible duplicated album?

[frapo]

 My Question or Issue

Hello everyone. I didn't write my devices and operating system because this is a problem I've always been experiencing even on older smartphones and with every computer I've owned, both Windows and Mac. I guess this is an account-based problem. It's a bit complicated to explain but I'll try to be as clear as possible. Basically, it happens quite often that I visit an artist page and some songs which I'm sure I saved in my library don't have the little check near them, as if they're not saved in my library. If I click on the "+" button and then go to my library and select that artist, these songs appear to be duplicate. If I cancel one of the two, sometimes they both disappear, sometimes only one gets deleted. If I don't click the "+" button and go to my library and look at the artist from my library, I can actually see the song I was sure I saved in my library. If I click on the name of the album from which the song is taken, the album page that opens up actually has the check of the song(s) I've saved, but if I switch again to the general artist page, that very same album appears with no checks next to the very same tracks. I checked if maybe there were two differents versions of the album, but no, it happens with albums that has no other versions (like deluxe editions or similar). 

[frapo]

It basically looks like I've saved the tracks from an hidden, duplicated version of that album which is visible only to me. This usually happens with old songs that I saved many years ago, so I guess this could be related to some kind of work spotify did years ago to its entire catalog or something like that. Indeed, I noticed that once I had this problem with the album "There is a **bleep**, believe me I've seen it[...]" from Bring Me The Horizon but the quality of the "new" album (the one that was accessible from the artist page) was better than the quality of the "old" album (the one I could access only by going to My Library>Bring Me The Horizon and then click on the name of the album next to one of the tracks from that album.
Sorry for the long post, I hope it was clear enough and I hope you have a solution for this; I just discovered I have this very same problem with the Metallica catalog: not a single song is checked on the artist page, but if I go to my library there's more than 80 songs saved! and re-adding and deleting every single track would be quite annoying (and I keep discovering this issue every once in a while with whatever artist...)
Thanks!

[Guido]

Hey @frapo.

Thanks for getting in touch!

We've had more users report this. There's a topic about this here. Feel free to leave a vote and reply in the topic.

Let us know if you have further questions. Have a nice day.

[frapo]

Hello Guido,

yeah i’ve seen this post but I really can’t understand what the answer means. “As the saved version is not the same version saved under The Artist/Album, this is currently expected behavior.” Why wouldn’t it be the “same version”?! What does this mean? also, does this mean that not a single song should be shown as saved on the artist page? because usually I DO see the songs as saved in the artist page, so it makes no sense saying it’s “expected behaviour” something that happens only with a bunch of artists in my library. 

[Peter]

Hey @frapo.

Thanks for asking about this - we'll be happy to clarify 🙂

The reason it is expected behaviour is because these are two separate albums, so this is not a bug relating to the "add" button not working, but rather a problem with duplicate albums existing on Spotify.

This has been raised with the relevant tech team, but unfortunately this is not something they are planning on fixing in the near future. 

This is because the idea has been submitted several times in the past (here, here and most recently here), but since the idea has not garnered enough votes from other users, it is not a priority at the moment.

Hope that clears things up! Let us know if you have any other questions.

[frapo]

But, why would you do that? Why are they two different albums? There’s only one visible album in the artist page, so where’s the other?

And also...I think the propose idea/vote is a great tool, but don’t get too attached to it. This is clearly a major and embarrassing bug, so I guess your tech department should be fixing it no matter what. Not for the votes, but for the reputation of the company itself. 

[Jemi]

Hey @frapo,

We understand what you mean. We just want you to know that the Idea exchange board is one of several factors we take into consideration, and we have other resources as explained on this Spotify Answer.

We want to assure you that the right folks are aware of this behaviour. What we know right now is that it looks like the duplicate albums are appearing when an artist has reuploaded their music to Spotify. When an old version is removed, the original URI link starts redirecting to the newer version but it looks like in some cases this is duplicating the album in your library instead. The newer version should be the only one visible on the actual artist's page. 

In the meantime, we suggest that you remove the duplicates and save the newest version from the artist's page. 

Hope that helps. We'll make sure to forward your feedback.

All the best!