My published playlist does not show up when others search for it

[415JLO]

Hello

I made public one of my playlists about a month ago. It shows up on my iPad and on my desktop Windows PC and my iPhone as being public. The playlist has a unique name; when someone does a search for that exact name, the search results come back saying there is nothing called that. When I send someone a link, they can see the playlist, and Follow it (add it as a playlist on their device). I have searched the help forums, and no one seems to be talking about this issue.

* Do you have to be a paying subscriber in order for your public playlists to show up in search results?

* Do you have to be linked to a Facebook account for your public playlists to show up in search results?

* Is there currently a lengthy lag (about a month or more) for a playlist that has been made public to get indexed and start showing up in search?

The name of the playlist is
Intro to post-classic rock

Any help would be much appreciated! I have a number of ideas for interesting playlists, but they would have limited impact if people can't find them.

Thanks

[Swanny]

Are you able to possibly provide a direct link to the playlist? This would help with trying to determine exactly where the issue lies.

[415JLO]

Yes:
http://open.spotify.com/user/415jlo/playlist/1vjzfOfLvJKF7PtyU6rDX7

Thank you very much for your time and expertise! This has been driving me crazy.

[Swanny]

No worries. Cool playlist! I'll escalate this and see if we can get some answers as to why it doesn't appear in search results.

A suggestion for the mean time could perhaps be to link people to your profile? http://open.spotify.com/user/415jlo

From there, they can then see all playlists that you have published. Might make it easier when you go ahead and create new playlists 🙂

[415JLO]

If I understand your suggestion, you are saying to send someone a link to my profile, rather than a link directly to the playlist, right? That could be helpful. Thanks.

[Swanny]

Yep, that's right.

[Swanny]

Hi @415JLO, I can confirm that there are a number of factors that may result in your playlist not appearing in search results. Factors that can be included is the number of followers that a playlist has, who you are following, who the users searching for your playlist are following, how many followers you have as well, etc etc.

Once you start sharing your playlist around and start building more followers, you have a better chance of having your playlist appear in search results.

[415JLO]

Thanks for your investigation into this, @Swanny . I appreciate your time. Before we close this topic out as a solution, I would like to clarify this, to make sure we are talking about the same thing.

I can understand entirely that, if I have a playlist with a very common name, or has frequently-used words/phrase in it, and someone only searches on those common words or that phrase, then my playlist might be buried so far down in the results (due to the factors you mentioned), that one might never see it. For example, searching for "classic rock" brings up hundreds, or possibly thousands, of matches.

What I am specifically trying to verify here is whether with a very distinct, or even unique, playlist name, and someone searching exactly on that uncommon name, then the searcher gets a message that there is no match at all. It sounds like you are probably confirming that this is indeed the case. If that is the case (as opposed to the scenario in the previous paragraph), then we have the answer.

In such case, it seems to be a pretty weird policy on the part of Spotify. And I can say with certainty that there are plenty of search results that come up which have playlists with only one follower (or possibly even no followers). To see for yourself, search for "classic rock," and then page down for quite a few pages and you will see lots of them, if you keep scrolling way way down.

Again, thanks for your help! Pending a response to this clarification, I will click the Accept as Solution button.

[MattSuda · Accepted solution]

2022 Update: This is an old post. These days I've seen playlists with maybe 10 or so followers show up in search. So this has been improved, but not all playlists will show up in search.

Yeah, this is something I've noticed. A playlist usually won't show up in search unless it has lots of followers or is popular.

Spotify's search is definitely not Google when it comes to playlists. All songs and albums are indexed, but playlists are not.

Spotify has a crazy number of playlists and with so many playlists created each day it would take massive resources to index all of them and show them in search. And since a lot of playlists could have similar names, if you searched for "My jams" you might find a few thousands playlists with the same name and you would be scrolling for hours and hours. That experience is not very useful, so I'm guessing Spotify realized that and that's why the search behaves the way it does and will index popular playlists.

The current recommended method is to go to a playlist and copy the HTTP link in the options so that you can send the link to someone and when they open the link your playlist will open up in Spotify.

Spotify also indexes user profiles, so if you have made the playlist public so that it appears on your profile, they could search for your profile and find it there. You can also copy the HTTP link for your profile for sharing. (just like playlists)

Hopefully this information helps.

[lubipa]

Hello,

Well this sucks especially when you are looking for something very specific or in laguage other than English (like Czech). There is actually a high chance somebody already created the playlist but since no one can find it, it may never be ranked high enough for others to see it.

As for the issue with common terms like classic rock - Spotify can easily limit the number of search results.

But to show 0 results eventhough there are relevant playlists on Spotify is rather unlucky.

[user-removed]

I hardly see how this has been solved. Seems like a common enough issue that's been remedied with excuses or reasons as to why it happens but no actual solution so that users don't run into this route again. Personally I have public playlists that are not showing up in search, on my public profile with my other public playlists, and are not available to my followers and friends. It seems like only certain playlists will show up on my profile when searched and others are simply missing. Playlists that have 0 followers still show up but only a select few that spotify decides to display. This is a misconception or unusual user behavior uncovering a loophole... it's a bug plain and simple. Public playlists should appear under "public playlists" when people look up my Spotify user profile.

To provide a use case scenario: I work for a creative agency that uses spotify premium for ambient music all day long. The employees here create public playlists and then go on our mac mini, launch the Spotify app, search their profile, select the playlist and begin playing it. This allows us to contribute with our own music and share it with the whole team throughout the day. The error arises when a team member creates their own playlist, goes over to the mac mini, launches spotify, searches their profile, and only sees a handful of their public playlists.

I'll say it one more time to make it very clear: We are searching the user profile and viewing public playlists from there, NOT searching the playlist name itself. The playlists are missing from the profile publicly.

Please solve, don't just run circles around the issue.

[smith1231]

Yes! Same issue at work & it's so frustrating.

[reisindj21]

But if it is a very unique name and there is only one of them, shouldn't it show up. 

My client is RIDGID user name ridgidtools. Even after I follow them they don't come up in my search. 

[iamacone]

I have exactly the same problem.

I have a playlist called "90'S LESBIAN" which me and my friends love and always share on social media but no one can find it by searching on Spotify despite it being a 'public playlist'.

When I do search on Spotify something similar comes up which has far less followers.  

I can't make head or tail of this..

[MadmanOnWheels]

It seems like Spotify could come up with a program that automatically catigorizes playlists, by name and either the date created or made public, to put them in a logical, searchable order. Of course, your issue goes a little beyond that, and they need to fix that issue, too. Have you submitted something to Spotify, directly, and on here?

Oh, and since you mentioned about listening to ambient music, I thought to share this small playlist with you. It's a work in progress. I'll mess with it, again, when I circle around to listening to some more ambient music.

https://open.spotify.com/user/madmanonwheels/playlist/7u4xukpcJo1h29rhevLjLl

[MadmanOnWheels]

I was just searching one of my playlists that I made Public and went through all the results, but didn't find it. This hasn't been solved. Since the time has come for it, I'll go ahead and share it, here. I hope ya'll enjoy it.

https://open.spotify.com/user/madmanonwheels/playlist/0UGQUpkcPpCh3NKjwXyFyd

[AlohaAloha21]

I have the same problem with my playlist not showing up in search engines and it's gaining traction like crazy right now with 40 followers in just over an hour. Here is the URI: spotify:user:21x32g6cshxlkszfeotqfxeca:playlist:4P0GAvjzSFvek8TpWanSXy

Any reason why this isn't showing up in searches on on my profile?

[MadmanOnWheels]

This is not actually solved. The "solution" that you presented is something that we can and have to do, for people that we think to share it with and the ones that ask for it. We make our playlists public for the world to see it. If they don't know it's there and we don't know who they are, many people will not see it. I read that Spotify is paying Google to to store music on their servers. This should be getting solved. They should have been prepared for this, in the first place. Spotify knows that's there's lots of people in the world.

Let us see a reply (a link to it), from Spotify. That will tell us that you contacted them, about this issue.

[rolandvanliew]

Unfortunately when others open my Spotify profile, only SOME of my public playlists show up for them. This has nothing to do with indexing complexity, as I only have a few dozen playlists. It's obviously a bug and a bad one. How hard is it to just display all of the public playlists instead of some of them (even after the user clicks "Show All").

[hayleyzzz]

i have this same problem at work.

my public playlists used to show up... and now they don't when i search them. i have tried making duplicate new playlist, searching older playlists of mine, nothing. idk why a few weeks ago i could search and find them and now i cant when nothing has changed. sooo frusterating!