Umm sorry Spotify, did you just have a hiccup ?

[hazy_hope]

Hi,

So every 6 months I have a Spotify routine to ensure all my liked songs keep their integrity. I'm so glad I'm doing this, I'll explain how I do it but you can skip the next paragraph if you're not interested.

First I'll scroll through all my liked songs quite fast (so it doesn't take forever) just to see if some songs have become grayed out. I'll look for the "added date" section because it's the most constant format and it's easier to spot when one entry is gray. I'll put all the incriminated ones in a temporary playlist (usually 40 songs out of 12k+ each year become unavailable) and when I'm finished I either search on Spotify if the song has been reuploaded under another entry, or just disappeared from the platform and in that case I have to look for it anywhere else on the internet.

BUT to be sure about the integrity, I also use tunemymusic to export a text file of my liked songs, and use Notepad++ with the Compare plugin to compare that file with the one I exported 6 months earlier.

Each green line it's fine because duh I add songs to my likes everyday. Each blue line means the entry has only changed place in the playlist, don't know why it does that but no big deal. Each yellow line means the entry is the same but has changed several characters, it happens sometimes but it remains the same song. The thing I'm looking for is red lines. When it's red it means there was a line in the previous export that is no longer here.

So there would be all the grayed out songs obviously since in the previous stage I removed them from my library because they were unavailable and I replaced them most likely with some local versions. But any suspicious red line I get to ask myself if I indeed removed that song voluntarily because I didn't like that song anymore, or if I misclicked and unliked unwillingly.

THAT'S IT that's my workflow. Until today I didn't think I could have anything more to worry about (because yes I don't trust Spotify AT ALL when it comes to keeping the integrity of my library in the long run).

Just about yesterday when I did my biannual routine I encountered a red line that I for sure didn't know about. I first thought it might be one of those unvolunteer unliked songs. But then in the other half of the Notepad++ page, there was not just a blank space as if it would have been the case if the song had just been unliked. There was another song, very unfamiliar.

When I searched for my missing song inside the liked playlist to see if it was still there, it was not. But there was that other song that I did not know about. And when listening to it, I was sure I didn't like it by myself, not my dope at all. As you can see in the video, the date of the like is from last year, which means the bug happened between january 2024 and now, because I didn't see anything like that during my previous routine from 6 months ago. And most importantly, it means that I didn't like it by myself!

So, Spotify, I'd like to have an explanation, how on earth did you unlike one of my songs and replace it with another random song? How do you expect me to trust you when doing stuff like that? And people, please, I encourage you do something similar to ensure they don't mess up your library.

Sorry for the long post, thanks for reading!

Plan

Premium

Country

France

Device

Schenker Vision 16 Pro, OnePlus 9

Operating System

Windows 11

[Vasil]

Hey @hazy_hope,

Thank you for reaching out!

We can see that you take great care of your collection and understand that this is important to you - it’s not our intention to disturb the integrity of your favourite songs and insert tracks you have not liked.

The content we offer is dependent on license agreements which means that sometimes songs can temporarily become unavailable (greyed out) or completely removed from the platform. The behavior you're currently describing can happen when an album gets reuploaded by the distributors. If 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. 

Distributors have been provided with guidelines of what they can do to keep tracks fully in sync and overwrite old versions, but we know that hiccups can occur. Sometimes different songs get mixed up but they can get reported so that this can get sorted out (as it has happened in this thread here) 🙂

Hope you'll find this information helpful. Cheers!