[Playlists] Solution to false/abusive reporting

[CloudlightRec]

Whenever someone reports a playlist - the title and cover art are removed immediately. This is often abused to hurt record labels and playlist curators. After contacting support - the account of someone who abused this system gets taken down. This person then creates another email and free Spotify account and repeats the process. 

There is a simple solution to the problem - enable reporting feature only after 10 hours of music/podcasts were streamed using the account. It won't change the experience for a normal user but makes copyright abuse impractical. It's cheap and easy to implement and would stop 95% of false claims.

Thank you for your consideration. 

[danielmjau]

So a playlist of mine has gotten its name and cover removed a couple of times in the past, and now the whole list has been deleted. "Policy Report Notification". It had a decent amount of followers (6,400) and was titled "Songs that everyone knows", with the picture shown below as its cover image. I now know the possibility of a celebrity being the cover might've been the reason for getting taken down, but it certainly doesn't feel appropriate, since its not an uncommon thing to come across on Spotify. 

Is there a possibility it might've been taken down for report abuse? Am I able to contact support via email, or is community posting my only chance?

Thank you for the help in advance!

spotify:playlist:68yw2M3eO3s8oGeJIKJfxT

[space-cat]

My playlist's Title and Description are still getting removed again and again.

Title: Oldschool Future House
Description: Old School (Oldskool) Future House, the True Future House. 2012-2016 years mostly. Your favorite metallic drops.

What does it violate? Which rules? Is it offensive for somebody? I don't even put a playlist art now.

It has only 646 followers. I don't make money on my playlists (though I receive a lot of spam e-mails from artists about it). I made it for myself and for the Spotify community. Just because I like this genre and I like when people love the music I love. But I can't do it anymore!

Support on the website says they can't do nothing. Support on e-mail does not respond. Support on Twitter said they passed my info to a relevant team, but after few days, nobody even contacted me about it. Now they are just ignoring me.

[space-cat]

I just checked the mechanism of reporting. And found out few interesting things:

1. You can register a new, free account, do nothing with it and just start reporting on playlists.
2. When you report on a playlist, Spotify asks for a confirmation e-mail. It doesn't need to be the e-mail you registered your Spotify account. Even more: you can use a temporary e-mail service for that. And you can report several times! Not sure, how many times can you report using the same e-mail, but I checked it about 30 times and it was still working. Then I just tired 🙂 I believe the false report bots just use their own e-mail servers so it could be easier to extract the confirmation code.
3. It works immediately. Right after you select a reason why a playlist title/description/art should be removed, they delete it. Even though they tell they will review my report, nobody actually reviews that. It works automatically.
4. Some of the playlists recovers after some time. I found a paid solution on Internet that helps playlists to "stay alive", but I also wrote a script on Python within the Spotipy library which checks if the name of a playlist is still there, and if not, it sets the title, description and uploads the cover art. If everything is okay, the script checks it later again. To avoid of being blocked for recurring queries, I used the random function to vary the time periods between checking. It is also possible to check your e-mail for the policy report notification e-mails and bring back the info after that, but I was too lazy for that, also I am not a developer, so it was kinda hard for me.
5. The most interesting thing: Some of the playlists are still there even after reporting. None of the info disappears even on a second: I put aside Spotify app window with the playlist and browser where I was reporting, so I would notice if it works. I also checked it several times on several playlists to ensure I didn't miss anything. It looks like some playlists have "immunity" for reporting. Interesting, huh? By the way, all of those playlists have a lot of subscribers.
6. Quite logically, but Spotify's playlists (the ones that made by user Spotify) have the Report button disabled 🙂

I could keep my script running, I could improve it so it could use e-mails as triggers, but within the rest of the Spotify's 'disadvantages', like low payments for artists, antivax/conspiracy theories podcasts, I decided to leave. The final straw for me were the podcasts with the russian propaganda on Spotify...

PS: I apologize to the people whose playlists I was checking the report process on.

[ww_adh77]

I finally got an email from Spotify that said they weren't going to take down my playlist anymore. On June 7, they wrote: "Upon further review, we have prevented this issue from happening to this playlist again. Please note, if you change the image or title of the provided playlist this protection may be lost."

I was elated! Unfortunately, they weren't being honest with me, as since then, I've had 3 more takedowns, most recently this morning. With the company being unwilling to do anything, it seems we have two options: put up with the harassment (which, actually IS a violation of their policies) or quit Spotify in favor of a different streaming service.

[Zovati]

I am a dj and I made a playlist with all the songs I would play in a club. I named it Club Mix and didn't upload a picture to it. This morning, I got an e-mail from Spotify, saying my playlist got removed (see picture below). When I added Club Mix back to it, I got another mail and the name was removed again. May I ask why my playlist is getting removed? It has 500+ songs, 27 hours long and I'd like to keep this playlist, as it took me hours to add all the songs.

Please don't give me the standard answer "it is against our terms and conditions of use". I have read the whole thing after I got this mail, and nothing is against the terms and conditions of use. Can you instead tell me what actually is against the terms and conditions? How do I fix this so I keep my playlist?

Link to playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6xIIHUMgURYZbLRkg2Wd9S?si=674f339216be46e8

[popistant]

I have the same problem. The list is called "Friday festival" and has no photo, but the name is removed by Spotify three times a day. 

Is there really no solution? Spotify can't do anything to solve it?

[AstralProjectedPizza]

Figured I'd add as well in here. I have a playlist that has gotten false reported/taken down 48 times since I made it about a month ago. I'm essentially just trying to outlast whoever keeps reporting it, by adding the info back in multiple times a day, it's exhausting and annoying, but Spotify support said they would email me to get in touch with the right people on their team, that email never came.

[kirkland_island]

My first post on this thread is on page 3 and was posted on May 4, 2020. This has been an issue for OVER TWO YEARS WITH NO ACTION FROM SPOTIFY. Are you kidding me??

In 2020 I was told they were working on a solution. They either 1. Lied and don't care or 2. Have the worst software engineers on the planet. This is not a difficult issue to solve. Why are playlists taken down immediately without any type of validation?

Dropped my subscription a long time ago and this thread still being active makes me happy that I did.

[shelbyaukerman]

Solution

I have dealt with this the past few weeks. After going through many different Spotify help portals I came to a solution. I contacted a person through the help line. The fifth person I talked to was able to transfer my conversation over to someone who is higher up. That person then reported the situation for me to an even higher source. I also responded to the Policy Notification email directly several times. After all of this, I eventually got a response from Infringement Claim Response. They said in the email that they prevented the issues from happening to my playlist again. Basically my playlist is now protected from this issue. The email was sent from infringement - claim - response at Spotify dot com. I can't put the actual email because Spotify will bleep it. If I were you I would try directly emailing that email since that is who fixed the problem for me. This took several weeks of accessing the help line, contacting Spotify through Facebook and Instagram, and replying to the email about 7 times. I would also see if the person you are contacting through the help line can just immediately transfer the conversation over to someone "higher up" who is able to help with the issue. I would also reply directly to the Policy Notification email that you receive every time you get it. This is what worked for me. I now just have to make sure that this issue is truly fixed and that my playlist won't get reported again. Hope this helps! 

[Parallorar305]

When Spotify will fix this? My playlists get false reports every hour! Pleaseeeee help