how to fix black screen

[salatovnik]

Plan

free

Country

 czech republic

Device

desktop pc

Operating System

windows 7 ultimate

My Question or Issue

 i keep getting a black screen, the only thing i can do is log out

[Loxer]

Hey @salatovnik!

Try to disable Hardware Acceleration, just click on the … top left corner, inside the View tab find Hardware Acceleration and next click on it to disable then confirm to restart Spotify.

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[salatovnik]

thank you for your reply, i tried disabling it and it didnt do anything, i tried enabling it again and it just doesnt do anything

[Loxer]

Got it!

Could you try to install Spotify in another user account in your PC to see if that helps? 🙂

[salatovnik]

im the only user on the pc

[bl4hbl4h]

I have the same problem across three (3!) different Win7 systems.

I fixed it by reverting to the previous version and blocking the updater.

[salatovnik]

i already tried that and i got the same result

[bl4hbl4h]

I downloaded version 1.0.92.390 from Filehorse and added this text to the hosts file (google it) to prevent Spotify from updating to the corrupt latest version: 

0.0.0.0 upgrade.spotify.com
0.0.0.0 www.spotify-desktop.com
0.0.0.0 sto3-accesspoint-a88.sto3.spotify.net
0.0.0.0 upgrade.scdn.co
0.0.0.0 beta.spotify.map.fastly.net
0.0.0.0 prod.spotify.map.fastlylb.net

This worked for all systems so far...

[salatovnik]

update - i got spotify to work (stable-ish, crashes after a few hours but it works fine for me) after a few more reinstalls, its not the best but it works i guess

[Deadstronaut]

Stop hardware accelerator

Press ctrl + 0

Hope it will work...

Cheers...

[jdtoo]

Plan

Free

Operating System

Windows 10

My Solution:

There is a lot of false and erroneous information in this forum and elsewhere on the Internet regarding the solution to the problem of getting a black screen with no login when you launch Spotify.exe.  This is NOT a video driver or video setting problem.  Here is the real solution:

Run Spotify.exe with the "--no-sandbox" command-line switch, i.e.

Spotify.exe --no-sandbox

That is all you have to do.  For those that are concerned about security, yes, disabling the sandbox is generally not a good idea in a Chromium-based web browser, but the Spotify app is not a general purpose web browser so the risk is minimized.  Plus, this is the only solution I could find that would actually work after much research and trial-and-error.  There are plenty of other Electron-based apps which use --no-sandbox by default.

By the way if anyone from Spotify reads this, in a future version of the Spotify desktop app, please include an option in the preferences to manually disable the sandbox without having to use a command-line switch.  That option is needed for apps which integrate with or launch Spotify because none of the apps I have tried allow using custom command-line switches to launch Spotify.exe.

[Mihail]

Hey folks,

Thanks for searching for the answer you need here!

In such cases a reinstall usually does the trick, as it did for @salatovnik. However, we recommend that if you experience a black screen with the app, you run a clean reinstall using these steps. They are more thorough and you can make sure that the cache and leftover corrupted files are not causing this issue.

If you are using Spotify free, it's a good idea to also check if the country you are in at the moment matches the one in your account settings. You can learn how to do this here.

@jdtoo we don't recommend that you modify any of the app files, as this may lead to other issues. This is also why you should always have a backup, just in case 🙂 If you'd like this feature added, you can post an idea about it on our board. You can read more about how your feed back reaches Spotify here.

Hope this is helpful but don't hesitate to let us know if you have any further questions!

Have a great day.

[Elicia71]

Thank you so much. I was having the same problem and this fixed it straight away. 🙂