Music Videos Appear Available But Wont Play

[FightinFoxy]

Plan

Premium (Family Account Member)

Country 

England

Device

Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra 

Operating System

Android Version 14

One UI 6.1

My Question or Issue

At first it took ages for me to get access to music videos: I am always quite late to receiving content from rollouts that are done depending on region and account basis so this was no issue to me. 

However, last week I had songs beginning to be marked as containing a video. As I was very excited about this feature I decided to try and test it immediately however when playing this songs I did not get the button to be able to switch to a music video.

Now this issue has got stranger as songs are no longer marked as having music videos but they do appear on artists home pages. However, when clicking them the app will sometimes try and load the video for a second fail and instead display the first frame of the music video as a cover for the song.

I have tried the login in log out twice to get the app to reload itself. Force ended the app and cleared cache through system settings as well as clearing the cache through the spotify app itself. Canvas is enabled on setting and I have made sure that both audio only download settings have been turned off. Despite checking all of this and turning some settings off and then on again the issue is still persisting.

Is this a known issue that is being worked on or something that has not been reported yet. If there are any fixes please let me know. I know the feature is still in beta and the rollout isn't complete so I could have just received some parts of it but am not yet able to play music videos, which is also fine. Just wanted to know if it is an issue on my end or if something like this is intentional. Thank you for your time.

[Joan]

Hi there @FightinFoxy,

Thanks for reaching out and for the detailed description. We'll be glad to help you enjoy music videos freely.

The behaviour is quite odd and we haven't seen any exact reports about something like this. Since you see the videos but they just don't play, this should mean that they are available to you, but something is preventing them from playing. In any case, let's try and narrow down where this could be stemming from.

Is only this Samsung phone showing this issue? If you haven't tested this on other devices with your account, please do so. Conversely, it would be very helpful if you can get somebody else who has working videos, perhaps another member of your Family plan, to log in on the same affected device to see if the issue occurs to them too. Also consider testing across various networks, both mobile data and Wi-Fi, to rule out any possible issues there.

Let us know how it goes.

[FightinFoxy]

Thanks for the quick reply  @Joan

I have tested multiple different wi fi networks and my mobile data but this has not helped. My desktop version of spotify however does not show music videos as being available at all. Neither does the tv version. Had someone log into their spotify account on my phone and the videos worked with no issues. The other members of my family account have music videos and they work across all devices. Would the issue then be related to my account? Thanks again.

[AlejaR]

Hey there @FightinFoxy,

Thanks for your reply. 

For starters, it's important for us to mention that we're always testing new improvements and features to give our users a better experience. So you may see something your friend can't see, or you may have access to a completely new feature for a while.

In that sense, we'd recommend creating a new account to see if you can watch videos there. If yes, we'd recommend you continue using the new one, as well as transfer all the content you've saved into your library by following these steps.

After that, and since you mentioned you're part of a family plan as a member, you can ask the manager to remove the old account from their plan, for then add the new account. They can follow these steps for both. Lastly, you can close the old account definitely to avoid confusion in the future.

We understand this is not ideal, and we really appreciate the time you took to let us know about this. If you prefer to keep your current account, you can make sure you're always running the latest app version available so you won't miss any developments.

We hope you found this helpful. Let us know if you need anything else.