Song Likes are gone (because of albums being reuploaded)

[Sleepwalker0908]

Plan

Premium

Country

Germany

Device

(iPhone X, Windows PC)

Operating System

(iOS 13, Windows 10)

My Question or Issue

My general approach when rating songs is to go to the artist page, listen to an album and give likes to songs. From time to time I come back to the same artist and continue with other/new albums.

Recently I noticed that "hearts" from albums of which I surely had tagged already, were missing. I then checked my "Liked Songs" playlist in the library and for some reason the songs were still in it.

Turns out artists will sometimes decide to re-upload an album, as you can read here. Unfortunately my likes won't get migrated over to the reuploaded album.

Sometimes when I don't remember that I already liked songs of an album I do it again. My "Liked Songs" playlist will end up like this ->

My first thought was then fine, I'll just remove the "hearts" from all the old version songs. It did not work the way I thought. The albums/songs are still linked in a way so if I remove the old version it also deletes the new one as you can see here ->

For testing purposes I tried it the other way round which surprisingly only removed the new song version from this playlist. It should definitely work the other way round as well and in my opinion this shouldn't be of an issue since the songs are indeed linked somehow.

In my opinion this is a bug.

Either automatically migrate over the likes to the reuploaded/new album versions and remove them from the old versions (this is obviously the prefered solution) or at least make it possible to remove likes from the old version songs without interfering with the new version songs. There might be other possbile solutions I didn't think of. Right now I basically have to recheck every song before giving a like or manually remove and add again to my "Liked Songs" playlist. Either way this is a huge inconvenience.

[Cronovoro]

Similar issue, here: sometimes I come across a song I'm sure I "liked" a long time ago, but it has no heart icon. I then verify if I saved a different version of the track but it's usually completely gone from my library. I suspect it has to do with songs or albums being removed and then reuploaded.

[to_be_still]

Also noticed this issue and it would indeed be nice if there were some sort of migration of the likes to the reuploads or some sort of notification of reuploads. I would also prefer automatic duplicate likes to the status quo. Because looking at an artists page and it appears as if all your likes are gone and you have to manually check if old versions are in your liked songs is not really ideal.

[Alex]

Hey there folks, 

Thanks for reaching out about this and sharing your troubleshooting with the Community.

Content availability across different regions depends on the copyrights holders and labels. Sometimes certain songs and albums get taken down from the platform. While some of them are reuploaded in the future with the same metadata including names, likes and such, some do not. 

That's why you'll sometimes see some of your liked songs gone.

Hope this info was useful. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have more questions.

[Sleepwalker0908]

I'm not sure we are on the same page here.

The problem is not that songs are missing because they get taken down. Reuploaded songs do not migrate over their "old" likes. Altough these songs still remain in the Liked Songs playlist.

[zachorosz]

My observations:

1. Go to artist page

2. Like a song/album

3. (Song/Album metadata gets updated or reuploaded... whatever happens here)

4. Go to artist page

5. Song/album 'like' is gone.

6. Go to 'Your Library'

7. Song/Album is liked.

Appears to be that liked songs or albums in 'Your Library' are not synced with the Artist's page. 

If I were to like that song/album on the artist's page again, I would have duplicate songs in my library.

[Ver]

Hey @Sleepwalker0908,

Thanks for getting back to us 🙂

Also, @zachorosz, thanks for reaching out to us.

This can indeed happen when an album gets reuploaded by the distributors. In case they have different metadata or URIs, the app will check backstage to link to the accurate track, but it will currently miss to transfer the liked status to the newer version. We've provided guidelines to distributors of what they can do to keep tracks fully in sync and basically overwrite old versions, but we know this is something that occurs.

We can't say if and when exactly this will be fixed, but we always strive to improve our app and will make sure to pass your feedback to the right team. 

As an alternative, we would suggest you replace the "old" track in the liked songs with the new one.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'll be happy to help.

[Redcow82]

This issue is very annoying, it's impacting so many songs...
Such a pity not to see easily which songs we previously liked, and it looks like it's an issue quite easy to fix since both the old and new versions of songs still share the same number of plays, then they share the same ID.

This issue is also described in this thread:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/Song-liked-twice-Unlike-one-both-gone/td-p/5251546/pag...

[whatyearisthis]

Can't this be fixed by migrating (or at least displaying) likes for linked tracks, similar to how the play count is displayed for linked tracks? I have not looked at the API, and obviously I have no idea what the actual DB schema looks like, but it seems like the "like" is attributed to a particular instance of the track instead of the set of all the linked tracks. I get that it's per-user data, so it's not quite the same thing as the play count, but I think they ought to be displayed in the same way.

If some track t is a member of the set of linked tracks { t0, t1, t2, ..., tN }, if I have liked any member of that set, the like ought to be displayed for all members of the set in the display, no? That way it would also carry over to instances of the track on compilations, singles, etc.

[OscarDC]

Hey Folks,

Thanks for your messages.

We understand where you're coming from and thank you for the suggestions. We really appreciate your feedback. In @whatyearisthis's case, we'd recommend posting your idea in our Idea exchange board (in case you couldn't find a similar one) so it can be voted and eventually reaches the correct departments to be taken into account.

We'd also recommend reading the Idea exchange guidelines before posting it to avoid the idea for being closed.

If anything else comes up, the Community will be here for you.

[2bonot2b]

Just wondering, I saved a song to my favorite and a few months later it became a different song but with same song name and artist. It seems I saved the song when it was with the wrong name, but now it was corrected to the song it should be, and it was not the song I listened to, so I completely lost the song I wish to save...

Now I have no idea how should I find the song I was listening to and wished to save? I barely remember any lyrics and few melody... Not sure if anyone has same experience and find the song somehow?

[mattaningram]

It's been years since this was first brought up and there is clearly a technical way to do it because track play counts transfer to the reuploaded/updated tracks. If you can transfer play counts, why can't you transfer likes? There is clearly a connection there. Does this not infuriate you as a Spotify user yourself?

[isle9]

Unbelievable that this hasn't yet been fixed. It's such an annoying issue that can't be that hard to fix. The lack of polish is honestly baffling.

[soundinears]

This is driving me mad! When will it be fixed, it's honestly making me want to stop using spotify!

[charliemonfared]

Spotify as an application, in general, is just one big bug that's never going to get fixed, I have 4k songs. Saved from 5 years of digging and searching.

Imagine my pain. The tech and responsiveness to feedback over the years has been cancer.

[charliemonfared]

Yet another year, and all that has come out is another shitty update making the UI even more worse.

I have stocks in spotify, I have no clue why they are so positive when you have a core product that is so poorly made and lacking.

If you guys find an alternative platform please let me know, I know there are external apps that you can use to migrate your library.

[zwutz]

This seriously needs fixing, and to be honest, I can't imagine it really being that hard. Like someone else mentioned, the play counts and such _do_ get migrated, so why not the like status (or any playlist status for that matter)?

And it happens constantly. I don't even "like" new songs sometimes for a few days because I know the distributor will likely re-upload them anyway.

I have some songs multiple times in playlists just because of this issue.

[zwutz]

This is still an issue, and I can't overstate how much this bugs me.

Spotify doesn't even give me a way to search for those duplicates, so I only notice it by chance or when a song I /know/ should be in my playlists appears as if I had never listened to it. Even worse if a song is in multiple playlists.

And it's not like Spotify does not know they are duplicates. The amount of plays is not affected and is carried over. So Spotify is obviously able to link the two versions. So why are the songs in my playlists not updated to the new version? I can't imagine this is particularly difficult to implement.

I beg you, please fix this. I like to organize my playlists, and this just makes all of the effort pointless.