Can't find my public playlists from another account

[Hunneric]

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

Sonos

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

My issue is similar to the one described here but the accepted solution won't for me.

I have a bunch of playlists, which are all set to public (not collaborative). I also work in an office with a sonos system which is logged into another (premium) account. I want to play my playlists from the sonos. But, when I search for them, I can't see them. The playlists have distinctive names (but not many followers).

The answer to the question in the linked topic was essentially that Spotify doesn't actually index all of its users' public playlists The workarounds I have found were, essentially to send a link to the specific playlist to the specific user who wanted to see it or to display the playlist's image as a code and then use the camera of a second device to read the code - essentially the same thing. Neither solution will work for me - because I can't send a link to the sonos player. I could send a link to the person who controls the account that the Sonos is linked to and, if they then followed it, I guess it would show up in their playlists and thus be accessible to the sonos but I don't want access to a specific playlist, I want to be able to create a playlist on my spotify account and then find it via the office sonos the following day.

Short of becoming a social media darling and making my account the centre of a great deal of attention and activity, is there any other way to prompt Spotify to index my playlists so that they become discoverable?

[Alex]

Hey @Hunneric,

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community!

In order for a playlist to be indexed and searchable it needs to gain a certain number of followers. You can try renaming it with a very unique name, however depending on the country your account is based in, it might not appear in searches still.

The best way to share a playlist would be sending a link to your friend.

Hope this info helps.

[Hunneric]

Alex,

Thanks for the reply but, as you will be aware, it isn't a solution to the problem I'm trying to solve - I don't want to make a specific playlist available, I want to be able to create one on my account and then access it from another one through Sonos' controller software - which can't receive the link.

The workaround is to send it to the controller of the sonos account. and for them to follow it. It then appears in their list of playlists, which the sonos can then find. A bit clunky, you'll agree.

I'm also confused by your assertion that playlists are only indexed after they've reached a certain number of followers. But it must be more complicated than that because I have certainly used search to discover user playlists with one or even no followers. How did they get indexed?

I'm guessing that playlists are actually indexed for any number of reasons but they are always indexed after they have a certain number of subscribers. Is it possible to find out any of the other criteria that spotify uses in order to decide what to index? Can I game the algorithm in this small way?

Overall though, I'm a bit baffled. Indexing a playlist presumably requires a minescule amount of data, a handful of kilobytes, surely.

If every one of Spotify's users had 20 public playlists, that's, what, 100kb of data apiece? Compare that to the 1.3Gb of memory that Spotify is currently occupying on my phone.

Or, put it another way, indexing all 172m user's playlists by default would occupy about 17terrabytes of storage. That's a lot, sure but you can buy single hard drives with that kind of space these days.

And it surely pales in comparison to the sheer scale of information you're processing on every song I've ever listened to, all the other playlists that song might appear on in combination with any and all of the other songs I've listened to etc etc etc.