What's wrong with Spotify's messy handling of different song versions ??

[hazy_hope]

Hi, I'm seriously wondering how far you guys want to go when it comes to making this service unusable. Please refer to the video, this is just out of logic.

If only there was the "show 1 more release" button (even if I stupidly hate this "feature" since it's a duplicates rat's nest), but there's not! The version I have in my likes doesn't show up on the artist's page anymore, and is not accessible anywhere else but from my likes.

Is it a "ghost" version? How am I supposed to trust you, won't you simply delete this version and never tell me about the song being gone from my playlist?

Plan

Premium

Country

France

[Mihail]

Hey @hazy_hope,

Thanks for reaching out. We'll gladly shed some light on the situation.

The behavior you're 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.

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. For now we suggest that you unlike the "old" track in the liked songs or saved album and replace it with the new one.

We'll keep working on improving this experience moving forward and advise that you keep the app up to date with the latest version so that you don't miss out on any fixes.

Hope this is helpful but don't hesitate to let us know if you have any further questions!

[hazy_hope]

Hi, thank you for the explanation.

One thing I don't understand: if a distributor re-uploads a song/album with at least one minor change since last version (e.g. different cover, different mastering, etc.) I get it that it's labelled as "1 more release". But when it's completely the same version just re-uploaded for some reason, no additional track, no difference in these tracks, what stops Spotify from merging these two versions, with the likes and playlist rankings people have given on the old version transferred onto the new version? It would be much cleaner overall on Spotify...

And what I'm most afraid of, as I said, is that someday the distributor simply deletes the version I had in my likes hence the track disappearing completely from my library without noticing me or at least transferring the like onto the new version... What would happen in this case, would it appear as a greyed track? I think I could live with that and if someday I found a greyed track I'd just look for it anywhere else, but I couldn't if it just vanished completely...