[Music] Warning when a Track is removed from Spotify

[JoacoRacing29]

I use Spotify to store the music i like - saving them on Playlists. Spotify adds music continuosly but also deletes other, by licence problems or whatever. But you Spotify must warn me in that circumstances, so I can get that music from another source. It s not acceptable that you quit music from your servers and from my playlist without any kind of warning. It s a disrepect to the user of your service. Please solve this problem as soon as it s possible.

[Coolin82]

Yes, this is a good idea. I need to know what artists to never support again if they pull their msuic from Spotify and just get all their music on torrents.

[Anamon]

While transparency is good, this is probably not easy to implement.

Usually, it's not the artist's decision, but the label doing it more or less against their will. Some labels do this in a very calculated way – release a track to Spotify in the first few days when it's being hyped, then remove it for 2-3 weeks hoping for big sales elsewhere, and later re-add it to the catalogue. Sometimes tracks just get moved around between releases or even lables, showing as unavailable but actually just having to be re-added from a different release. That makes it not a trivial question how removals would even be advertised, without giving false information.

Also, it could get a bit overwhelming 🙂 I usually do a mixtape every few weeks, and it's not uncommon to come back to it after a few months and see about 10% of the tracks missing. If you create many playlists, you could easily have dozens of notifications a day.

As it is, I'm pretty happy about how transparent Spotify is about it already, in that tracks don't simply get removed, but that your playlist stays intact. That way, at least I know when something from my playlist goes missing. As I hear, other services usually just hide the tracks and don't give you any option of even seeing what's been removed.

[sinan_tm]

This isn't hard at all to implement.. Has nothing to do with the artist, their label, or even the fact that you may have a specific song over different playlists. All Spotify needs to do is shoot an automated notification out to anyone who saved the song and say "unfortunately the song you have saved: xxxxx - xxxxx has been removed from your libraries"

That's all I want haha. Just some notice!

[Anamon]

It's not as simple as just implementing it, is all I'm saying. Even on the basic level it might be a very expensive thing to do. Keep in mind that this means for every removal of any track from any of Spotify's many regional markets, they would have to scan all playlists of all affected users. I'm sure there are many thousand removals a day, maybe even an hour. There are also more than 100 million users with who knows how many playlists. That is a massive processing tasks, and would require Spotify to probably run a few hundred additional servers.

But there are so many non-trivial issues involved in this as well, which was my point before. I estimate I have a couple of hundred playlists with maybe an average of 100 tracks each. I notice new songs that have been removed almost daily. I would probably get a few dozen such notifications each and every day. And many of these tracks re-appear very quickly, even after just a day. So would Spotify also send out notifications when that happens? Now I already have around double the notifcations. Remember that Spotify is currently in the process of removing pretty much all notifications from the service. They have removed notifications about updated playlists, notifications about new releases by followed artists, and notifications for private messages. The general direction things are heading, it doesn't seem like Spotify are planning to add any new notification facilities, rather trying to get rid of the few that are left.

[seemsLogical]

I am +1 for simply greying-out a removed track. No notification required - just grey it out so I remember what it was.

Playlists are often used by those of us who lead busy lives to tag a song we'd like to hear again.  When they disappear, the chances of us recalling the tracks can be low, which is disappointing. 

My recent example - I could've sworn "Amen" by Alex Ebert was on a playlist, but I could not find it.  The app suggests deletion, but the website mysteriously suggests it may remain. 

https://play.spotify.com/album/2Rz3dEIFiXMLC4LuiEfA7s

Updating a database is not necessarily something that requires "hundreds of extra servers".  They are already updating table entries when the tracks are removed.  Do the same as when a playlist includes your own (not-on-Spotify) music - grey it out. 

Thanks

[meahtenoha]

Updated: 2016-12-07

Hey folks. Right now you can show unavailable track by going to Settings -> Display Options -> Show unavailable tracks in playlists. This setting also works for saved songs. As we have this feature we don't have any plans for creating an additional warning when tracks are removed. Of course this idea will stay open for more votes and comments and we'll continue sharing your feedback internally. Thanks!

[Knirps]

Seriously?  I always thought I was having network errors when a song was marked unavailable!  Like I was getting spotty reception and it just wasn't downloaded.  That actually means it has been removed from Spotify?  This should absolutely be specifically mentioned whenever you load up Spotify.  Like in the notification banner on the top.  "xyz has been removed from Spotify and can no longer be played" or something.

[Anamon]

@Knirps As pointed out earlier in the thread, releases being removed from Spotify, for various reasons, is an exceedingly frequent thing. Across my several hundred playlists, I must have a few ten thousand tracks bookmarked, and I assume that a few of them disappear every day. Sometimes I create a playlist, and a month later, 10% of the tracks are unavailable. A notification banner is not suitable when the number of events adds up like that, and would quickly break down in this scenario.

Also, over the past year, Spotify have gradually removed all other channels of notification (notification tray, mobile notifications, e-mail notifications) so there really isn't any way left for them to even send information out to users anymore.

[Apexheritage]

Under what circumstances do songs or entire albums get deleted from the playable list? I am suspicious that this is underhanded marketing. 

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[Ruffs1]

Agreed! Great idea. Spotify's response to the idea is, frankly, ridiculous. As if we are all going to go into the settings every 5 minutes to check whether something has been removed! Seriously, Spotify?! I'm yet to read one of your status updates in which your justification for not doing something actually makes sense.