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"Password Reset" on an almost weekly basis.

"Password Reset" on an almost weekly basis.

Plan

Premium

Country

USA.

Device

Multiple PCs, Android phone and smart speakers

Operating System

Windows and Android

 

My Question or Issue

For almost two months now, Spotify has been resetting my account password almost every week, due to "suspicious activity". I have contacted tech support about this and, while gracious and apologetic, they have not helped. 

 

I have a fairly regular usage pattern: Mon to Wed, I listen at my home PC in the morning, then at my office PC during work hours, and back on my home PC at night. Sometimes I listen on my phone while commuting. On Thursday and Friday I work from home so I listen there, usually playing in one PC and remotely controlling from another. At home I also have a few Amazon Echo and Google home devices and sometimes I switch to those. Similar pattern for weekends.

 

Now, does any of that looks suspicious, or unusual for a paying user? Because starting the 3rd week of June, every Wednesday, I get a password  reset email, usually during the afternoon. And then I reset it, and have to re-login to all my devices. It has happened SEVEN times so far! I suspect I'll see an 8th email this Wednesday.

 

Customer service suggested that I do not use the Windows app on any PC that has a VPN --which I did-- and to try not to have the app open on multiple devices at the same time --which I also did. None of these has stopped the weekly resets.

 

Out of desperation, I'm sharing this story here to find out if anyone else is having this problem. Maybe a few more cases will escalate this as a formal bug in their security algorithm. 

 

 

Reply
27 Replies

Hey @mklopez,

 

Thanks for reaching out.

 

Here in the Community, we cannot access or make any changes to accounts, so I recommend that you reach back out to Support so that they can take another look at your account: https://www.spotify.com/about-us/contact/ 🙂

 

Hopefully, they'll be able to resolve this issue!

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Note: I'm not a Spotify employee.

Thanks for the reply. As I said in the post, I just wanted to know if anyone else has experienced this problem. I know that no one here --except if they work for Spotify CS-- can possibly fix it.

 

I have talked to support repeatedly. Last time they said they would "escalate it" to the proper team, and haven't heard back since then. If I get another password reset notice this week, I'll reach out again.

 

This also started happening to me. I used to use Spotify in a native mac application at work, and have recently uninstalled it to use the Web Player instead. At work I have a VPN, which can easily be the trigger, and now I get password reset emails due to suspicious activity.

It's certainly annoying, but even more so is that support are completely oblivious of the problem and reply with canned responses about problems with my passwords (which are randomly generated, unique, and handled by a password manager)

Last week I had a web chat with customer service. They guided me to do one last password reset, remove old devices and apps from my account, and they assured me they did something in my account that would stop the resets --as long as I don't use a VPN (weeks ago I stopped using the app in the single PC where I use a VPN, didn't stop the resets). I'm waiting to see if it happens again this week.

I'll be interested to know if this works for you. I have to use a VPN at work, and if I can't use the Spotify web app while at work that will certainly be annoying. I understand there are workarounds (e.g. having earphones that can pair with multiple devices simultaneously), but I really don't like it when a software decision (made by others) requires a specific hardware configuration.

 

I guess I understand Spotify's situation: my gut feeling is they check for VPNs and do some level of geoblocking / geofencing to avoid mis-use, but (as hopefully they did with you) there should be a way to flag certain accounts once they are confident the usage is legitimate.

Hi.

While reading your post, it sounds exactly like my problem that I have experienced. Also the timing is very similar. My password resets started happening sometime in July on exactly one week mark (Sunday nights specifically). Super frustrating when you actually asleep, you wake up in the morning to go to work and you can't play music. After 4-5 resets, it was less frequent, about once every 10-12 days. I had tech support case opened. They had me reinstall the app on all my devices, reset password once again ( like the past 8 resets were not enough), asked if I use VPN because apparently "hackers" use VPN's too (seriously got to tell that to my Chief Information Security Officer). Upon assuring that I do not use any public VPN's, app reinstalls, they finally escalated the case. If you think escalation team solved my issue... the answer is NO. They were basically rehashing the same thing what Tier 1 support told me already, but now instead of live chat it was back and forth emails. Looks like Spotify does not have a concept of case ownership. Basically random techs will respond to your queries/responses. Completely useless waste of my time. Nobody was able to provide me with the reason why this happens. They would always quote "we care about the security of your account" while at the same time there is no option to enable Multifactor Authentication on the account. When I started to be more demanding and less polite, they completely ignored me and stop responding to my inquiries. At some point I said - enough, this should be fun, not a hassle. I ended up stopping auto renew on my account, got a subscription on alternative platform, moved my family there, transferred my playlists, and eventually canceled my family premium subscription. After being paying customer for 5+ years with no prior issues, this happened to me. This is obviously their defective "suspicious activity" detecting algorithm that will cost them money in the long run. Reddit is filled with posts that pertain to this issue. Unfortunately these are all left "open" with more questions than answers. Without any dent in their subscribers numbers, nothing will be done to solve this issue.

Same here, with the "Choose a password you haven't used before" on the top of that it just feels like spotify is trying to insult you. Because I'm not a machine and I can't create new passwords every week which I will remember on next day at least .

My advice is to use a password manager and generate (and save) a random,
unique password.

Just to follow up....

 

Over the past weeks, by request of the "escalation team", I had my devices and services reset, and they even asked me to use a different email address --I created a unique email just for this-- and nothing has helped, the password reset happened  again this week.

 

In my last email I begged them to have someone from their IT or security department to look at the system logs of the software that scans for these security problems, so they can identify exactly what is the trigger. Until someone does that, this will be just a guessing game. They responded that they had submitted all the info "to the respective team" and they would let me know when/if they find anything.

 

I really don't want to cancel my account, but much like artur2000 I might end up finding this too much of a hassle, specially a PAYING hassle. Pandora and/or Amazon Music are looking mighty attractive right now.

Yes, good advice, but.. this requires to transfer the password to other devices, which is quite annoying if the password manager is not available on these devices. With the weekly resets that I expirience now for several months I am really geting tired of the CtrlC CtrlV saving complex passwords in text files on USB sticks just to open spotify on one of my devices.

I start feeling the same. I am used to Spotify and happy with the tracks and pricing. But the hassle of weekly password resets without any help from the support makes me about to end my subscription.

Follow up: The password resets keep happening every week, although no longer exactly 7 days apart. Sometimes six, sometimes five. And as other users have commented, customer service has stopped responding to my emails about this problem. 

 

Really makes me curious to find out how many other people are experiencing this problem, and they just decided to cancel their paid service without contacting CS. We'll probably never know.

It's been happening for a year or so now, where I'll just randomly get logged out, and sent an email about "suspicious activity" causing the reset. Surely if someone else was trying to log in, they would tell me. The only suspicious activity I've done is use Spotify a lot, and if that's what's causing the password resetting then I guess I'll go ahead and use some other music streaming service. I've tried changing my email, to no avail, so I literally have no idea what could be the issue.

Thanks to this issue, spotify encourages me to use less secure passwords, all of the strong passwords I remember are now blocked and can't be used again. Thanks spotify, very good work, much appreciated - keep it up and don't change 🙂

 

Maybe next time reset my password if I play the same song 3 times in a row - playing the same song over and over again is suspicious after all 🙂

 

Jokes aside, this needs to be fixed, maybe relax the filter a little bit, or inform the user about suspicious activity before resetting the password? This is a spotify account, not a bank account, there is no need to be so strict about this, the users aren't idiots - you don't need to protect them from themselves this much...

This has been happening to me also, just got the fourth email a few hours ago. I contact support last week and was just told to revoke apps, and not use a vpn (which I never did). The only thing I did, was use spotify on a new os (duel booted another windows install along side my main), which might be what started all this, regardless, this is super annoying.

 

 

The thread that ckir03 mentions just repeats the same things that every customer rep says, and I have tried every recommended solution. I tried to use Spotify only in a couple of devices (my computer at work, computer at home, and an Echo speaker). I changed my email to one that is unique to my Spotify account. I even tried resetting my password myself, weekly. Nothing works, I'm still getting reset and logged out every week, like a clock. 

There's reference in the thread I linked to an automated Spotify security algorithm that is causing the problem for various reasons.  Spotify developers did not seem willing to make changes to the security algorithm per their rep's explanation, which is unfortunate and will likely mean no easy solution for now.

This happens to me also.  I get emails about suspicious activity.  My password is very complex and long now that I have reset it multiple times.  I have 8 logins and it is very time consuming to re-log into each of them.

 

  1. App on Desktop PC
  2. Chrome on Desktop PC
  3. Edge on Desktop PC
  4. App on Android Phone
  5. App on Laptop
  6. Chrome on laptop
  7. Edge on laptop
  8. XBOX

In addition, when this happens and I go to work, I cannot use spotify offline on my phone all day as there is no internet connection there and spotify on the phone has logged me out over night.

 

Is there any way to show the suspicious activity and acknowledge it as legit?

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