Spacebar doesn't start/stop music after you hide the app on Mac. 5+ year bug Spotify will NEVER fix.

[Conanthebarb]

You all know what I'm talking about. Space bar never starts/stops the music in the Spotify app for Mac after you use keyboard command + H to hide the app. This bug is at least 5+ years and Spotify refuses to get off their lazy asses to fix it. What a complete joke.

[Amay]

Hey @Conanthebarb, welcome to the Spotify Community! 🎵

In modern laptops like Mac or Windows, you can only use keyboard shortcuts with apps that are currently in focus (in-use). For example, if you have two media apps open, but both are in the background or hidden, then the keyboard shortcuts will most likely never interact with their player.

There could be exceptions, like if the keyboard has media keys that interact with the OS, then it could work with the apps as well, but there is no guarantee. This is actually the expected behaviour.

I hope that makes things clear. For anything else, don't hesitate to reach out. 🙂

[dapollo]

Plan

Premium

Country

Thailand

Device

Macbook M1 Max

Operating System

MacOS 15.5

My Question or Issue

In the past, I could open Spotify with Spotlight or CMD+Tab (or 3rd party launchers like Raycast) and immediately hit the spacebar to play. Sometime in the last month or two, this stopped being the case. Now, I need to get Spotify to be the top-level window and then hit Tab to focus INTO the window of Spotify before the spacebar can be used to play or pause the music.

[Conanthebarb]

Terrible, useless answer that neither addresses my issue nor solves it. 

[tonyturquoise]

Amay's answer seems partially correct. All music apps I've used allow the use of space bar to stop/start music when the application is "in focus", meaning it's the frontmost application. This works with Spotify, sometimes. Often it fails and the only way I've found to get the spacebar behavior back is to click the mouse in the player controls. That seems to give focus back to that part of the app.

Making it the "top-level" window does not always work and has been annoying me for a last few months. This is a bug. 

[MPerfect]

This is indeed catastrophic and primitive. What else do you think we're trying to do pressing space bar when Spotify is in the foreground. Now we have to click ON THE PLAYER, because it doesn't even work if you click at the top of its own window. This is just stingy budget on paying programmers and stealing all the money to pay the doomed investors who do nothing useful. As usual. Too bad.

[MihailY]

Hey folks,

Apologies for the radio silence here.

We're sorry to hear about the issue you're experiencing with the spacebar shortcut. Accessibility and ease of access have always been a top priority here at Spotify and we're always looking for ways to improve. That being said, we appreciate you taking the time to reach out and report this issue. We've made the right team aware.

We're here if there's anything else you wish to address.