Spotify keeps playing hidden songs

[Spoty13]

Since there is no option to delete a song from an album, I hide them and actually I missed that feature from apple music. So there is a lot of hidden songs in my album catalogue and now they just suddenly start to play. Updates and new device didn’t work. If even I hidden and unhide them again, next day same story. How can I fix that help?

[mikkle]

To clarify, the hidden songs are still marked as hidden in the GUI, even today: The song titles are grayed out, the (-) icon shows next to the duration to indicate that they are hidden, and right-clicking on a hidden song provides yet another confirmation via the context menu items. However when I play the album, the hidden songs are not skipped as they should be. I'm not sure if it's got anything to do with casting the songs over speakers, or just due to playing the album on Android. (My guess is it's the latter.)

By the way, I just performed a quick experiment that somewhat confirms my theory. None of the songs I had marked as Hidden earlier this week are being skipped when I play the album. In the screenshot below, you can see that the track "Anguish Incarnate" is marked as hidden, but it still played after "Wetland" instead of being skipped.

I just now marked a different track as Hidden -- "Marsh," a track that I had not marked as hidden earlier this week. As expected, after the previous track finished, "Marsh" was skipped, and the next track is playing:

Hopefully the engineers can get to the bottom of this. This is not a feature I'd ever used in the past but now that I know it's there, I would love to make use of it!

[silent-watcher]

@Yordan @Mikkie 

I had a video session with a Spotify employee earlier this week and relied my findings. We've made some progress in narrowing down what may be the cause but @little_computer needs to do some further code divination before we can be certain.

Reliable symptoms and behavours on my end:

1. Once the issue starts happening, it affects all hidden tracks on all playlists.

2. Likewise, when the issue is resolved, it resolves for all hidden tracks on all playlists at the same time.

3. We have not been able to establish a reliable way to reproduce the issue but it appears to be a combination of time (see #4) and actions (see number #5).

4. It seems to be impossible to reproduce an issue more than 1 time in any 15 minute time window.

5. The issue appears to require the app to be closed and started again to occur.

6. The issue gets resolved by either hiding or unhiding ANY track.

7. If a blocked song is being played at the time when you hide/unhide another title and fix the issue, the player moves on to the next valid track on its own.

8. When the issue is in effect, hidden songs, even if they are showing as greyed-out on playlists, are still playable by directly clicking on them or by pressing the "Next" button.

9. Hidden songs are injected into the playing queue at the last moment. What I mean by that is that if you have a playlist with 3 tracks and the 2nd one is banned, if you play #1 and check the queue, the queue would only show tracks #1 and #3. But if you click next, the queue will have #2 injected and the queue would show now tracks #1, #2 and #3. 

As far as I'm aware, @little_computer is currently investigating the possibility that it's a combination of banned list caching combined with improper banned list state restoration upon app restart if the cache is expired.

[sci-bro]

Maybe AI are better devs and can fix this? 🤔

[silent-watcher]

I doubt it, @sci-bro .

AI is good at routine, well-know stuff but it really struggles with non-standard cases like this. That's why we need real, experienced engineers and will need them for the foreseeable future.

[A]ctual [I]ntelligence, so to speak. 😉

[notasp0tifyuser420]

Plan

Premium

My Question or Issue

When I hide songs from a playlist, the songs are still playing. I can hide them and show them again, but nothing happens, as if I didn't have the function. The songs are shown as hidden, but nothing changes. Please help.

[Yordan]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your continued assistance with investigating this issue.

We're excited to announce that hiding songs is now available in playlists and albums on desktop too, and the feature should now sync across all your devices! 😎

We're still keeping the investigation open while we work on perfecting the hide song behavior. As always, we'll keep you folks posted as soon as we have any updates, stay tuned! 👍

[-Karma-]

„Is now available in playlists“ yes only in each particular playlist. If I understood correctly it still doesn’t hide tracks across all playlists…

The entire point of hiding a track is not to hear it ever again, in any playlist.

[silent-watcher]

Yeah, @-Karma-, I agree. Feels like they may have missed this use case when designing this new hiding functionality.

Previously, as far as I'm aware, there was just one global level you could ban a song at. 0 or 1, all or nothing.

It appears that, when designing the new song hiding functionality, they may have missed the fact that if someone hides a song it is because they don't want to hear it at all, ever...

IMHO, they need to do some addtional work and have a more hierarchical structure where there is a global exclusion level which applies to all contexts (playlist, album, artist, etc) and then, if they so desire, hiding in specific context in addition to the global context, because it appears that at the moment they just have a flat list of individual contexts, without an overarching, global supercontext.

[teomas1]

i literally used the feature for the exact same reason as you haha
but yeah its still not working

[nikmgl]

Hello,

I've chosen not to play certain artists on my account and used “Don’t play this artist” feature to "block" them. As shown in the attached screenshot, songs by these artists appear grayed out (i.e., blocked), and they won’t play when I double-click them — which is expected.

However, there's an issue: if a blocked artist's song is next in a playlist, it still plays automatically when the previous song ends or if I click "Next."

I've already tried clearing the cache, but the behavior remains the same.

Has anyone else encountered this, or is there a fix?

Thanks!

Plan

Premium

Country

Turkey

Operating System

Android and Win11