[Android] Suggestion being played instead of search result

[öäüß]

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Australia

Device

LG smartphone

Operating System

Android 10 (clean install after support case, issue persists)

My Question or Issue

After returning a search result, it seems to be impossible to play exactly that song. Even using the button "song" when searching, and after finding the exact match, there is only the green play/shuffle button on the right (see screenshot).

And the song being played after clicking said button and after the ads never seems to be the one found. As can be seen in the second screenshot, that random song is even marked as "suggestion"

Is that a bug or a feature? If feature, is it different for premium subscribers?

Search result:

 

Song played:

 

(On a side note: As I recently needed the support chat with the app being stuck in play without any player controls, I specifically asked whether the search result should be played, and she said yes.)

[Ver]

Hey @öäüß,

Thanks for posting here 🙂

We couldn't check the screenshots. Could you try again attaching them via the Insert Photo option in the post editor? Alternatively you can, for example, upload them to Google Drive and share them with us. We'll look into this further.

Keep us posted.

[öäüß]

Just edited my post, looks ok for me now.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[Ver]

Hey @öäüß,

Thanks for keeping us posted 🙂

Glad to hear that it worked out and the app behaves as expected again.

If you need anything else, the Community is here for you.
 

[öäüß]

No, the app doesn't look ok at all. I was referring to the screenshots I updated.

I hope it's not asking too much to have a look at them?

[Elena]

Hey @öäüß,

Thanks for getting back to us, sorry for any misunderstanding, we'd be happy to explain a bit more.

On the free experience of the app most of the listening happens on shuffle, on demand listening to a certain song is possible in a few select playlists, but not for all albums and lists in the app.

This is one of the main differences between the free and Premium functions on mobile. You can learn more about the other differences here. In this case it's expected that when you search for a song you'll get the album/playlist that contains that song and you'd be a able to play that whole collection on shuffle. 

Hope this info helps. Let us know if you have any more questions.

[öäüß]

Thank you Elena, for the clarification 

I can't believe how hard it was to confirm what I already suspected, and how long it took to get a reasonable answer.

I wouldn't have bothered, if I hadn't been thinking about going premium again.

I'm sad to say that this is one of the reasons for saying goodbye to Spotify for good: With the weird changes, glitches and design choices, a responsive support and helpful community forum would have been vital.

Sadly you guys, as friendly as you seem to be, way too often miss the point of complaints, questions and requests, and give counterproductive advice due to lack of specific product knowledge.

I wanted to believe that Spotify might turn away from the dark path they have chosen, but I can't see that - even if they ever fixed the broken library functionality - Spotify can't be trusted not to destroy the efforts users put in their library organisation again, and again by illogical re-designs.

I have read hundreds of user comments with clear and good explanations about what went wrong, how it could be fixed, or made even better.

Spotify ignored them all, and pushes more and more towards being a platform deciding what their users SHOULD listen to, by making it harder to find what you want.

Bye bye, have fun with that!