Issues with playing tunes outside of Liked Songs or playlists on the desktop app

[Dian]

Hey there,

We're aware of issues with playing songs outside of the Liked Songs collection or playlists.

This is being investigated.

[pathtracer]

To anyone else with this issue, DO NOT follow this advice to use msconfig to enable safe mode.  Not only did it NOT work for me, but now when booting all I see is a black screen with no monitor input at all. So now I have to deal with that too instead of just Spotify not working.

If you are on windows 10 and you have an m.2 nvme drive, do NOT set windows to safe mode via msconfig. Black screens on boot seem to be a common problem with no easy solution.

[Eni]

Hey folks, 

Thanks for all the info you've sent so far.

@Hriday_Vijay, @Deaf_Idiot_God, if you're still experiencing this, would you mind sending us the exact make/model, operating system and Spotify version of your devices? Also, let us know which troubleshooting steps you've already tried. We'd like to investigate this further.

We'll be on the lookout.

[Benke01]

I just recently got this problem as well. I can't play songs I search for. The media buttons in the Spotify Windows app are all greyed out. As soon as I move the searched song or its album into a new created playlist I can play it.

I've reinstalled the Spotify app multiple times verifying that all Spotify folders in my user account has been deleted.
This is embarrassing Spotify - for such a large company to put out such a easily discovered bug! And I'm a developer myself.

[Dian]

Hey there,

Thanks for the replies.

The described issue is most probably device related.

We can further isolate the reason for this with a different internet connection, e.g. a hot spot from a phone and making sure, that Spotify is set as an exception in your firewall settings. If you have a VPN activated - turn it off.

Also reset your router, if you haven't already.

Keep us posted,

Cheers!

[Arjandc]

Plan

Premium

Country

Netherlands

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

I have been playing mostly playlists / daily mixes without issues. However, when I search an artist / album and want to play a song there, the player does not start and stays greyed out. Uninstalled, closed down pc, started pc, reinstalled, opened and closed it, checked the drivers/etc - host file (empty). So no clue what else to try. 

On my ipad / iphone all works normal, it is just on pc within the app. 

[Alex]

Hey there @Arjandc,

Thanks for the post.

You can try downloading the app from our website instead of the MS store or vice versa. On some PCs the MS store version doesn't always work as expected.

Let us know how you get on with this.

[TroubledHomie]

This same issue started happening to me about a week ago but I can play any song from the browser spotify.

[CarlosE]

Hey @TroubledHomie,

Thanks for your reply in this thread 🙂
 

Can you let us know the exact make/model and OS of the device you use? 

Just to confirm, is this happening only in the web player or does it happen in the desktop app as well? Did you notice if something changes if you use a different browser to open the web player? Try it and let us know how it goes.

On another note, could you share with us the troubleshooting you’ve already done? Let us know if you've tried some of the steps suggested on this thread.

We'll keep an eye on your response! 

[simoncowel]

I've been having this same issue for about a month. Before, I was able to play music perfectly fine. Is it possible to roll back to another update while I wait for a fix? 

one thing I don't think anyone has mentioned here is that for me when I first experienced this, my phone and PC while both on the same account stopped interacting, such as if I changed a song on my PC while listening from my phone, it no longer changes the song that is being played on my phone too. 

I am on windows 11

[ldice]

This one was the solution for me. Tried reinstalling both the windows app store version and the direct download. Cleared out all information and it was still behaving the same way. Figured I really only listen a lot when working so did a hotspot via my phone, restarted the app and it started working as normal. My guess, there was an update recently to the app that added a dependency that is being blocked by common firewall rules. While I may have found my specific reason and a "workaround" it is not a very good one and I would like to see whatever update that caused it to be rolled back as we shouldn't be seeing Spotify being blocked if using industry standard methods for sending/receiving data.