How do I stop links from automatically playing?

[victorolaitan]

Plan

Premium

Country

• Canada

Device

Pixel 4A

Operating System

Android 12

My Question or Issue

It's really frustrating when I'm listening to music & a friend shares a link to an album/artist/song & when I click the link (just to take a look), Spotify stops what I'm listening to & starts playing that album/artist/song.

I have looked around & can't find anything to fix this. I'm honestly so annoyed that this is an actual "feature". Please help me turn this thing off, it's really ruining my experience.

This also happens sometimes on desktop.

[Alex · Accepted solution]

Hey @victorolaitan,

Thanks for the post!

Opening a link to a song on mobile will result in the app opening and playing that song.

There is no way to switch this off manually from the Spotify app settings.

Hope you find this info helpful. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

[jacobhanson1010]

That's just awful!

[luizzeross]

I think most of users don't like this intrusive behavior of the app. I just clicked a song on WhatsApp to look what my friend was sending me, it stopped my playlist and started playing the song from the link immediately. I was only gonna look the artist page. =/ Put an option to disable this!!!!

[p_7b56-ogs1e]

Losing my existing queue or spot in a long playlist is very frustrating.

Can you please change the link behavior to at least implement a prompt asking options like: "Play now", "Add to queue", "View only"?

This applies to the desktop client, as well.

[TonySnark]

Yes, super helpful... not.

[bademche]

Most annoying thing ever!!!

[atli_freyr]

This is so frustrating, why would anybody want that to happen?

[Elomo64]

And to think this is a paid service! This behavior needs to be removed.

[bsamyn]

How is this considered "solved"? 

This is so annoying! 

[MajorSkyblue]

Hey @Alex, 

Thanks for your reply!

Opening a link to a song on mobile resulting in the app opening and playing that song is awful behaviour. 

There is no way to switch this off manually from the Spotify app settings but there definitely should be. 

Hope you find this info helpful. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

[carl3y29]

me too!

[iAmRoland]

The provided solution is not a solution. Really annoying that this is a feature with no option to disable it or alter its behavior. As others have pointed out, often I just want to view what a friend has shared and maybe queue it, not autoplay what they share.

The real solution so far has been to open the link in incognito (and also click cancel on the annoying popup to open link in Spotify), if I then want to listen I manually search the song in Spotify and queue it. Pretty terrible user experience in other words.