Friend activity and song radio stop working after device restart

[andreibvasile-1]

Plan

Free

Country

United Kingdom

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

Recently the friend activity and Go to...Radio have stopped working (find attached screenshot). I was using the installable version of Spotify and thought that might have been the issue but after uninstall with Revo and installing the Windows Store version the issue was gone, until I restarted the device. This applies for the installable version as well and only happens on this machine. I have not been able to test this on another PC but my phone doens't have this problem.

[Sebasty · Accepted solution]

Hey @andreibvasile-1

One user who had same issues found out that there was a line in their hosts file that caused this issue. Basically, traffic from specific Spotify address got redirected to void and thus radio, Daily Mix and friend feed didn't work.

Check out this thread for more information. 🙂

Let me know how it goes!

[andreibvasile-1]

Yeah, I found that line but why is it there? I'm not aware of anything that might have modified the hosts file.

[Sebasty]

@andreibvasile-1

To be very honest, I don't know.

Antivirus programs may edit the file, some lock it. Malware may edit the file as well.

I had a whole lot of entries in my own hosts file a while ago. I used Spotify (free) on desktop and suddenly I got no ads whatsoever... for a whole year. Later when the new web player wasn't working at all, I discovered all these entries in my file when I was searching for a solution. Most were blocking all kinds of advert servers. :')
I never found out what did this.

It's a useful file in itself, very efficient for blocking unwanted websites from porn to ads as well as malware, but to avoid host hijacking you can navigate to the file, right-click on it, go to Properties and make it a Read-Only file.

Hope this helps, have a nice day 🙂