Songs Purchased from iTunes Store Will Not Play

[bme0qe-qmw_fu]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States of America

Device

iMac mid-2017

Operating System

MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4

My Question or Issue

Hello. I've had Spotify Premium for about 3-4 weeks now, so I hope you can tell me what I'm doing wrong. I have successfully linked Spotify to my local files, however Spotify will not play songs purchased from the iTunes store. Songs purchased from Amazon or BandCamp play fine, however all of my iTunes store purchases are greyed out and will not play.

The support page on Local Files recommends installing QuickTime (clicking the relevant link actually shows that this advice is only for Windows and that the advice is outdated as of Windows 8). As I am on a Mac, QuickTime is definitely installed and all of the songs purchased from the iTunes store play in QuickTime. Help!

Why won't my iTunes store purchases play in Spotify? To be clear, I am not asking about playing a local file on my SmartPhone. This question is in reference to Spotify Desktop.

For reference the support file I mentioned can be found here: https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/listen-to-local-files/

[Loxer]

Hi,

It's a good thing that you found the artilce that does help you and would be even better if you had read it carefuly:

"Some of my local files won’t import/play

Spotify supports .mp3, .mp4, and .m4p files. It doesn’t support .mp4 files that contain video, or the iTunes lossless format (M4A), but we’ll do our best to match any unsupported local files with songs from the Spotify catalog.

Note: Files or downloads from illegal sources are not permitted.

Some of your tracks may be protected in restricted formats. You can install QuickTime on your desktop to allow most of these tracks to be played on Spotify."

It is clear that since you are using macOS and iTunes the songs format is in MP4A, a format which Spotify states in this help article that is not supported.

Just change the format by removing the A at the end or rename the extension to MP3.

Have a nice day 🙂

[bme0qe-qmw_fu]

Hello!

None of the files are formatted as iTunes lossless format M4A. All are encoded as one of the two Spotify-supported mp4 or m4p formats, and none of the files contain video. I'm sorry that I did not specify this in my original post.

Thank you for your reply. I'm still hoping to find a solution to this problem, so I appreciate all the help I can get.

P.S. - Future readers please note: renaming an extension from mp4 to mp3 will make the file unplayable. If you do want to change any alternative format to mp3 you will have to reencode. Please be aware that reencoding an mp4 to an mp3 at the equivalent bit-rate will result in some loss of audio quality. Some protected files may prevent reencoding.

[Loxer]

Hi,

I guess I might have the solution, which unfortunately is that songs are protected like they are on Spotify. Even if they are downloaded you can't play there anywhere else.

I might be wrong since I haven't used iTunes for Music purposes.

Sorry that it won't work 🙂

Maybe contacting directly to Spotify might shed more light on this topic.