Specific Songs Refusing To Play

[hopelesscalico]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States of America

Device

Both iPhone 13 Pro and MacBook Air

My Question or Issue

I have recently begun experiencing an issue where specific songs refuse to play. I cannot play them by clicking them on a playlist/album, by individually searching for them, or by adding them to the queue. I get the "Spotify can't play that right now" error message every time I try. The most notable example is the song Music by underscores, but a few other songs of hers are refusing to play for me as well. I do not have her artist profile or the songs blocked, and some of her other songs will still play. The songs are available in my country and do not appear grayed out. Nothing has changed about my phone or laptop since I last listened to these songs. I have logged out and back in, switched devices, gone off WiFi, cleared my cache, restarted my device, and reinstalled the app. Nothing has helped.

[Joan]

Hi there @hopelesscalico,

Thanks for reaching out. We'll be happy to help you enjoy all your favourite music once more.

I was able to reproduce this with the song from your screenshot - the same error appears and then the app skips to a different song. I found a couple more underscores songs that exhibit this same behaviour, so this definitely seems like a deeper issue. So we can narrow things down and find where the issue lies, please send us the links or URIs of any and all songs that you've found cannot be played in this manner. Thus far, is this isolated to underscores or have you seen it with other artists too?

With this information, we’d be happy to investigate.

Keep us posted.

[theydrewa31]

I'm having the same issue with some underscores songs 😞

[V0xxal]

It seems to be an issue with the label. Other artists signed to Mom+Pop like Porter Robinson, Magdalena Bay, and MGMT are having similar issues with their songs.

[hopelesscalico]

So far, the only songs I have personally noticed having this happen are Music and any song off of Wallsocket. It seems other people are having larger issues, though, so I wouldn't say for certain that this is an underscores-specific problem.

[AlejaR]

Hey there folks,

Thanks for all your replies here. 

@hopelesscalico, just to confirm, are you using a VPN service? If yes, try setting Spotify as an exception, or switch it off completely, to see if you notice any difference. 

We'd also suggest you make sure to update the audio drivers of your laptop, and that the OS of your phone is up-to-date.

Additionally, we'd like to gather some additional info:

• Are you using the Connect feature? Does this happen when the playback comes directly from your devices?
• Are you using any audio cards on your laptop?

@theydrewa31, @V0xxal, remember to send us the links to the songs. You can follow the steps in this article to share them with us. It'd be helpful if you could let us know if this is happening across all your devices as well.

We'll be on the lookout for your replies!

[hikosque]

This is my experience with the composer George Walker. When I played songs from the artist page, there was a song by Shubert (the one that just happens to be in the same album with George Walker's song) and another one was some field recording by someone by the same name (George Walker). I guess there are some tricky issues about the management of credit info but this is no good.