Playlists appear empty in the mobile app after switching plans

[Melko2631]

Plan

Switched to Free

Country

India

Device

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

Operating System

Android 14 - One UI 6.1

My Question or Issue

I recently switched to the free plan from a Premium Individual plan earlier. I am moving to a different country and was planning to switch to the student plan once my enrollment is complete.

I figured that the songs I had downloaded to listen offline would just be removed from the storage when I make the switch to the free plan. Rather, now I see that my playlists are all empty in the app with a feature saying I can "Swipe through the songs previously in the playlist". I had about 455 songs in one of the playlists and hundreds in a few others.

Thankfully, the playlists are retained in the web player but just not in the app. I've tried to uninstall and install the app, cleared the cache and all storage, none of the steps helped.

Please let me know how I can access the playlists through the app.

(For some reason I couldn't sign into the community webpage and post this with my account. But problem for another day.)

Thanks and Regards,

Sriram

[Vasil]

Hey @Melko2631,

Thanks for reaching out and great troubleshooting so far!
 

Could you send us a screenshot of the error you're experiencing when logging into the app? It looks quite odd and I've never encountered it before. Aside from this though, here are some pointers that will hopefully help you out:
 

Changing your country & subscription

• Keep in mind that the country settings of a free account need to be updated after 14 days in order for you to continue using Spotify. 
• In case you do update your country settings before upgrading to Premium, your new payment method when subscribing will have to be issued in the new country.
• If this won't be possible for you, you can instead wait out until you can subscribe once more with a payment method issued in your home country.

Considering that your web player works though, the country settings might not be the responsible party but it's a good idea to keep the abovementioned info in mind.

Free mobile experience

Being on the free tier shouldn't technically change anything in your library, it should only remove your access to the Premium features like listening on demand or offline listening. As for your issue, on free it's expected behaviour that you will not be able to browse through the track lists but we'll be able to tell you more once we can see what happens on your end.

With this said - as a next troubleshooting step, you could try removing all Spotify-related data from your device and install it anew as shown here to see if that would make a difference. Make sure you're not using any VPN services 🙂

Community login

In regards to your issue with logging in to the Community with the correct account, you can see if logging in from a different browser or an incognito browser window would help out! In case it does, remove some of your most recent browser cache & cookies and try logging in again from a normal browser window. If the issue persists, describe to us what is happening and we'll gladly take a further look!

Keep us posted! We'll be on the lookout for your reply 🙌🏼

[Melko2631]

Hi Vasil,

Thank you. unfortunately I didn't take screenshots of the same and ended up subscribing to the Premium student with my current verification and now the app seems to be working fine.

But I can however confirm that I did consult the post on a clean reinstall of the app and performed the same, it did not rectify the issue. If it helps all my playlists said "The Playlist is empty, start adding songs to it!" or something to that effect and gave me suggestions. This applies to all the playlists I created and that was made for me, including "Liked Songs". I then accessed a few particular songs (that were in my playlists) and hitting 'play' from the search screen gave me a prompt stating "You've discovered a premium feature".

During my previous premium subscription I had downloaded these songs to listen offline. When I switched to premium these songs were all completely inaccessible from the app (I also made sure the settings were set to online mode).

I suppose I cannot troubleshoot now that I switched to a premium plan again.

Thanks and Regards