[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. 

[Fellipe_Uller]

I'm suffering from the same problem here, I have a playlist with 30k followers and in the last 4 hours I received more than 80 reports, I'm starting to think that there might be some kind of report bot, as this is very strange, I get a report every 3 minutes.

Every time I fix the playlist (cover, title and description) and reply to emails received from spotify. I tried to contact chat twice but both times only the attendants only recommended that I answer the emails.

This spotify reporting system is totally wrong and this situation is very stressful for us curators who spend so much time on the platform.

We are all waiting for a solution to this very serious failure.

[mlem42]

Experiencing the same problem here. @Top50Clean, I wasn't about to get your code running (probably my inexperience with python), but I managed to make a simple spotipy script to accomplish the same thing.

[STP444]

Awesome thanks @Top50Clean! Ok no worries enjoy your holiday. Yeah good idea I'll try and get some more shares on the Twitter post.

[ttxta38]

This has impacted me also today. It looks as if the botnet owner must have a database of playlist links and is just polling them as anytime I change the name / add a name after it is removed within 10m it gets reported again. This is a playlist with 650 likes so not exactly a money maker or the most popular.

Spotify needs to sort this out as this is a major issue for people and I cant see anyway to deal with it other than making it a private playlist, which is obviously not ideal for those followers that will be listening to it regularly.

[furlan_tv]

This is happening to me since march, looks like the reporter got tired and now hired a bot to report my and others playlists, now my playlist gets reported every exact 2 minutes. I really don't know what to do since every time i reach out to the support team they say "a exclusive team dedicated to this will reach out to you reguarding this case" but since MARCH no one helped me at all, i even reached out to the Executive team which is the highest level support Spotify gives us but they also didn't help (as expected) this is a shame not just for us but for Spotify.

[SjorsWeijermar1]

Has anyone had this problem and actually come out the other side of it? Or has this been the death of your playlist in all cases? 

[STP444]

@ SjorsWeijermar1 If your playlist gets targeted non-stop for more than a few weeks then it's difficult to recover...

I've noticed that a lot more playlists are getting reported the last few weeks... even smaller casual users with very few followers... so hopefully now that it's impacting the overall user experience for general listeners Spotify will have to address it soon... If people threaten to cancel their subscription they would probably listen. I would but I'd be shooting myself in the foot... 

I've been playing around with Apple Music more lately and they are starting to improve so I imagine that some people might be motivated to try them instead... one of the main appeals of Spotify is creating and sharing playlists with friends so if that's gone then many people will think twice... 

[Crow74]

On June 14th, now almost a month ago, this forum idea was updated by @Mario from Spotify with the message that is at the top of this thread:

Quote:
"Your suggestion has gathered the votes necessary and your feedback is now reaching the internal teams at Spotify. They're aware of the vote count and popularity of this idea. We'll continue to monitor and check out the comments here, too."

So I guess there is 'some' movement internally on this issue.

It would be nice to get a new update from Spotify or from @Mario to tell us when and how they will finally fix this issue.

A while ago I saw someone suggesting to implement a captcha when people try to report a playlist. I haven't tried to report a playlist myself (obviously), but if the process really does not have a captcha to prevent bots from reporting en masse, it would be no-brainer to implement this ASAP!

[furlan_tv]

They do have a Captcha system, but bots nowadays can easily bypass it… we need something more specific like have 20 hours of music listened on that account to be able to report a playlist for ONCE.

[kirkland_island]

My favorite idea is verified playlists titles. Seems like a lot of work, but curators could apply to have their title/photo combination verified, which would be good until any changes were made - this would be far less work than Spotify "reviewing" the thousands of reports each day.

The other thing Spotify is missing is the impact this has on small, up-and-coming artists. These artists rely on smaller playlists in order to start being heard and known in the Spotify community. There is only one reason someone would set up a bot to ensure their playlist rose to the top: money. If these bot owners have the largest playlists in each category, they essentially have a monopoly. Any small artist who wants their songs on these playlists would be charged a fortune. Smaller playlists allow these artists to grow their brand naturally, instead of being held hostage by the only playlist owner in a certain genre.

On another note, I have officially cancelled my Spotify premium subscription due to this reporting. For me, the reporting abuse has been going on for over a year (I commented on this exact thread in 2020).  The last 2 weeks have been the worst, as I can not keep a title or photo on my playlist for more than 5 minutes. I have even tried naming the playlist just a period and just a space. The photo below is the new look of my playlist - no title, no photo (previously Summer Country 2021 with a photo of my dog who passed away in May). I will be back to Spotify premium when this issue is solved.