Some songs won't play?

[fishfromtesco]

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

Macbook

Operating System

Windows 10 (bootcamp)

My Question or Issue

 Some songs is blacked out and it won't play? I tried nearly everything, re-installing, logging out, logging back in, turning off all proxies, firewalls, etc. It can't be copyright because it used to play like 2-3 weeks ago and it still plays on my phone.

[Sebasty]

Hey @fishfromtesco

I'm pretty sure it's not a copyright issue. Unplayable tracks just appear greyed out, if you have the setting enabled in your Preferences.

To fix this issue I suggest checking your hosts file as that could be the culprit. 🙂

Try this:

1. open Notepad as an administrator (right-click - Open as Administrator)
2. go to File - Open and navigate to

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

3. Choose "All Files" instead of "Text Documents" next to the File Name box. You'll see a handful of files. Pick hosts and click on Open.
4. The file is opened. You will see a block of text with # in front of each line and might see entries like

0.0.0.0 website.com
127.0.0.1 website2.com

Check for any entries with spotify or fastly in the address. Examples may look like:

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

(and any variations inbetween)
5. If you do find any, you can delete the line. You can also add a # in front of the line, that's 'commenting out'.
6. Save your changes. Restart Spotify.

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[DennyEMufc]

Asking someone to follow your bizarre instructions is simply crazy! Forget all that nonsense and just set it to hide unplayable tracks, it's a copyright for sure, I prefer to know what's unplayable so I leave it to show unplayable!

[MC0]

I've had those issues with several tracks that are definitely not copyrighted. I looked into my hosts file, and it turns out an ad blocker had added such rules there (supposedly to block spotify ads, among others). After removing them, everything returned to normal.

It's important to note that these entries should never be part of the hosts file, so the "bizzare instructions" wouldn't be necessary if the user didn't tamper with their hosts file in the first place.

Other than that, it could hypothetically be caused by your ISP or firewall blocking requests to these hosts, but i cannot think of a reason to do that.

[mohansubra2005]

No, that actually fixed the problem. Even with the setting you had mentioned on, those songs still would appear, its not copyright. I'm able to play those songs anywhere else other than windows 10 so its definitely not a copyright issue. It's simply the spotify service was under a list of blocked services.

[notelistener]

Dude, you've saved my evening - I've had this problem for maybe 2 weeks now, and had tried everything save reinstalling my drivers when I found this thread.

Seems the culprit was this line of code in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts => 0.0.0.0 spclient.wg.spotify.com .

I just added a # and a space, saved and closed the file (as admin), opened Spotify, and songs that came up blank where now playable. 🙂

[Sebasty]

@MC0

Well, I also found these lines in my hosts when I was trying to figure out why my web player didn't work at all. It looks like many users have this kind of issue, so it's definitely worth checking the hosts to see of that's the one causing your issues. 🙂

ISP may block Spotify traffic too, I've seen some users with that issue, but usually it's more related to workplaces where corporate firewall filters network traffic. There users usually have no admin rights too, so while they can see the contents of hosts, they cannot edit.

Glad to hear this helped 🙂