Spotify doesn't play random songs outside of playlists

[Hoffnung]

Plan

Free

Country
Germany

Operating System

Windows 10

For some reason when I use the app, Spotify randomly started to simply not play some songs. It used to also not show half of the content of random playlists or telling me they were empty all together. I have tried to restart my computer, reinstall the app several times, delete/empty the spotify folders in /local and /roaming and I tried turning off "enable hardware acceleration" before playing anything after a reinstall as another post said this might be part of the problem. I also changed to another wifi connection which didn't help either. While my playlists started to work again after the first reinstall, spotify still refuses to play most songs outside of playlists and simply shows empty songs like this without playing anything no matter what I do:

 The app worked fine for me for nearly a year so why does this happen now? It is unlikely this is connected to any updates from Windows since the last update has been a while ago and i don't think there is a new update I could do right now either.

I appreciate any help thank you!

[Sebasty · Accepted solution]

Hey @Hoffnung

You can try checking you hosts file, maybe that's the culprit for this.

You'll need admin rights for editing.

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.

You can also try removing all lines to see what happens.

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[Hoffnung]

Hello!
Thank you very much for the detailed answer! It did help me! I hope this will last for a while! Thanks for taking the time to reply to me!

[Sebasty]

@Hoffnung

I'm very glad this helped you! 🙂

You may lock your hosts file up, so it's read-only and not modifiable anymore.

It won't cause any harm.

Do this:

1. Open File Explorer, navigate to

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

2. Right-click on hosts, select Properties.
3. In General tab under Attributes add a checkmark to "read-only". Click OK.

This way it's certain the hosts file will not be the culprit anymore. 🙂

Have a nice day!

[Derpo18]

Thank you so much! It worked and I'm back to playing music again.