Album artwork won't display when I'm on employer's network, but I can stream audio...what to do?

[nocomply65]

Plan

Free

Country

United States

Device

Dell laptop.  32 gigs of ram, i7 processor, 1TB SSHD with only 176 GB used

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

I'm trying to use the windows PC app to stream while at work and it will not display album artwork while I'm on the network in my employer's office.  Once I connect to the hotspot on my phone, I can see album artwork.  The issue is consistent across the web player and desktop app.  In fact, I cannot load the web player when connected to my employer's network, but it loads right away on my phone's hotspot. Audio has no problem, but it's annoying that I can't see album artwork, as it's sometimes a little quicker and easier to navigate my library.  This is strange, I would think if my employer's network provisions inhibit any part of spotify's service, it wouldn't work at all. 

Are there any technical details that someone can disseminate to me so I can have a conversation with our networking guys in the office?  This is really annoying and I don't think it should be this difficult to get album artwork.  Our networking guy isn't the most proficient, so spell it out for us if you could.

[Sebasty]

Hey @nocomply65 

It does sound like something Spotify makes use of is blocked in that network. Spotify uses several different addresses for its functions and it's not uncommon that some addresses are used for specific functions, not the entire program.

For example many people had issues with their Daily Mixes and Friend Activity not working, everything else worked for them. They had some Spotify-related addresses blocked by hosts or firewall.

I would suggest taking a look at the network firewall (or hosts file) to see if there are anything Spotify-related blocked, such as web addresses that contain spotify or fastly.

For example these I had to remove from my system:

0.0.0.0 weblb-wg.gslb.spotify.com
0.0.0.0 prod.b.ssl.us-eu.fastlylb.net 

Note: since Spotify works well on your computer with hotspot, it's not the hosts on your computer that causes the issue.

Let me know how you get on 🙂

[nocomply65]

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of information I needed!  I will pass along some of this to my network engineer in our office and see if he can look into it for me.

I will follow up here if I make any progress, but my next challenge will be just getting them to do something about it here.