Music videos don't load; Unable to switch back to audio after accidentally turning on music video.

[Pansarankan]

Plan

Premium

Country

Sweden

Device

2021 laptop

Operating System

Windows

My Question or Issue

I accidentally hit "switch to music video" on the desktop app. But no music videos will load, so neither will the switch button. In MV mode, spotify apparently refuses to play the audio if the video isn't loading, which it's not, and my spotify account is therefore effectively softlocked and unable to play any song that has a music video. I have scoured the internet for a solution, and found nothing. I've had spotify for fifteen years, and am kind of surprised at not being able to find a solution.

[AlejaR]

Hey there @Pansarankan,

Thanks for posting here in the Community and welcome.

We'd recommend you perform a clean reinstall of the app on the affected device. That way, you can make sure you're running the latest available version of the app and that the stored cache is not leading to this behavior.

If issues persist afterwards, we'd like to gather some additional info. Please send us:

• The OS version your computer is running.
• The exact Spotify version you're running.
• Do you notice any difference if you switch the internet connection you're using? If possible, you can create a hotspot on your phone to connect your computer.

Keep us in the loop!

[rlnt]

This is such bad advice. Why would a reinstall be required if a user turns on a feature Spotify itself provides with no option to turn it back off? This just shows bad UX within the app once again. A service Spotify provides doesn't load, and you can't turn off the feature anymore, which completely locks your app. Very nice.

[HolySkillet]

I stumbled upon the the same problem and this is just stupid. I don't care particularly about the music video, and there really is nothing that should stop me from going back to the audio-only song. I'm also not going to reinstall the app or delete 10GB worth of cache just because you disable a button you shouldn't disable.
This is help on the level of windows forums - come on and just actually fix it. 

[habibi97]

i had this issue right now and i think i found the fix. prior to the issue i had videos turned off cus who on earth wants to watch videos on spotify. somehow i was curious enough to click music video on a song and it got stuck in an infinite loading screen.. i went to settings (desktop app) i scrolled down to display and i enabled "Display short, looping visuals on tracks (Canvas)" and i finally saw the prompt to switch back to audio. as soon as i switched back to audio i disabled it again. Seriously Sporify remove videos, most useless thing ever added. 

[Uded]

In other words, I will simplify - we know/we do not know there is a problem, but we definetely do not have a solution. As such I will ask the user to reinstall the app as it should fix it, as we do not want to invest the time into a problem reported by one or two users.

You do not need to thank me for this tl;dr.

[Virtuoses]

Fix:

Settings > Display > Turn on "Display Short looping visuals on tracks"

Once you see the display on the right of your window, click on the full screen icon at the top left

You can click on the center of the screen to """pause""" the video, then on the top left you'll see a prompt "Switch to Audio", click that, done

you can turn off the canvas thing after that

[Emerje]

This fixed it for me, the key was to go full screen and pause to get prompt. Clicking the small window did nothing, had to be expanded to work. Thanks for figuring this out! 👍

[SergeiFNZ]

Fix for me was to open spotify in a browser and click switch to audio, as in the app there was no such button.

[SergeiFNZ]

For linux guys the actual fix is to install libatk-adaptor, and videos will start working. No idea what is needed for Windows.

[algaegarza]

Dude, thank you so much. This is the only thing that's worked for me. Any songs I liked that had a music video would no longer play and would interrupt my listening session. It was infuriating.