Playlists with create dates BEFORE my account activated?

[AlemanPHL]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Windows Laptop

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

I have playlists in my library from Feb 2021, but I didn't open my account till Oct 2022.  The music is not at all what I like.  Where did the playlists come from?   

[Alex]

Hi there @AlemanPHL,

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community!

Can you clarify if you've created your free account in October 2022, or you've subscribed for Premium then?

It's possible that you've created a Spotify account earlier in 2021 via Facebook or when opening a link to a song and were required to log in.

Keep us posted on how you get on.

[AlemanPHL]

Created in Oct 2022, since I was using Pandora up until then.  My 2022 top songs include artists I've never heard of before, like Mads Christian and Tobias Rahim LOL

[MihailY]

Hey @AlemanPHL,

Thanks for getting back to us.

We can confirm it's not possible to have personal playlists with a creation date earlier than your account's creation date. One way to check when your account was created is to search for the welcome email you've received upon signup.

Regarding Your Tops Songs playlist, it's most probably a generic one since you haven't used your account enough for the system to be able to generate a personalized one for you.

We hope this clears things up. Let us know if there's anything else.

[AlemanPHL]

Hey @MihailY, my welcome email is dated Oct 11, 2022, but there's stuff in my library dating back to 2020 and into the end of 2021.  Can we clear my history somehow?   I want to delete everything from September 2022 and earlier.

[Alex]

Hi there @AlemanPHL,

Thanks for the reply.

There is no way to clear your account history and recommendations. 

If you want to start clean, you might want to create a new account with another email address. This way you can build your recommendations algorithm from scratch.

Since you have older playlists on this account, the account might have been used previously on an older device, like a TV/ speaker by a family member who had access to the Spotify account. 

From our end, we can't see exactly when your account has been created and first used, so this is just a guess, but we've seen a number of similar cases and that is the most likely cause.