Desktop will not play undownloaded songs

[glowypants]

I've used Spotify for 2-3 years and this problem has only come up in the last week or so. I am a Premium user and I live in the United States, if that has anything to do with the issue, but I don't think it does.

Anyways, the reason I'm making this post is because I've searched for hours and have not found a single other case like mine, so this is ultimately my last resort, as I've also tried everything I can think of on my own.

As of recent, whenever I try to play a song I have not downloaded on my desktop Spotify app, I get a blank image for the album art, and the song time bar does not move; it stays at 0:00, as if the song I'm trying to play does not exist. There is no blue bar of text saying I cannot play the song at the moment, and I am not in offline mode.

This is what the album art shows when I try to play a song and this happens: there is nothing there, not even the name of the song or artist. I try to download the songs, but they don't show up in my downloaded library when I click the plus mark to download them.

This is the song time bar when this happens. It is clearly unpaused, but the song is not actually playing.

At first this only happened with very few songs, but quickly it has no escalated to the point where I can no longer play any single song that I have not already downloaded before this started. I have tried to uninstall and reinstall Spotify, deleting all the local files, and more. The weird part is, Spotify works completely fine on my phone. I can play undownloaded songs as often as I like with no issues. This is only on my desktop, and as far as I know, there are no viruses affecting this, because every other app on my PC works perfectly as it should.

I have quite a bit of downloaded songs, maybe 700-800, but I've read that the limit is 3,333. I have around 730 GB of space left on my PC, so space is not the issue. Please give any advice you can, this is a major issue for me and I've tried everything I could think of and find.

[Keanu_C]

Hey @glowypants Welcome to the Spotify Community!

Could you possibly share the name of the artist, album and song. Im going to check to see whether the song/album is available in the US.

Keanu_C

[user-removed]

I have the same problem, it appears randomly, i have to restart spotify to make it work.

[glowypants]

It isn't just one artist, it's every single song that I don't have downloaded. For example, I find a song I like on YouTube, so I go to Spotify to check out the artist, and none of the songs will play, no matter what artist it is or what song. The only ones I can play are the ones I have downloaded, and I can't download new music because Spotify is acting as if it doesn't exist.

[PantsWP · Accepted solution]

Dude, I think I finally found a solution to the problem - well, it worked for me. You need to delete Spotify's storage folder which caches all the songs you play. Here's how:

1. Close Spotify

2. Go to C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage - where "user" is your Windows profile name

3. Remove all of the folders in the Storage folder, do not delete the folder itself

4. Open Spotify, the issue should be gone

Hopefully, this is a permanent solution but I'll let you know if things go south. Worst case scenario it's just a temporary workaround but we'll see how it goes. 🙂

[Keanu_C]

Hey @glowypants keep us posted if @PantsWP solution works out!

Keanu_C

[glowypants]

Thanks so much for that, you're a life saver!