Unplayable or unavailable songs

[dubbstaz]

How come some songs are unplayable or grayed out.... on a playlist or album after add it to my Library

Plan

Premium

Country

U.S.

Device: Android 

Samsung Galaxy S10e

Operating System

My Question or Issue

How come some songs are unplayable or grayed out  (unavailable songs) .... on a playlist or album after add it to my Library

Plan 

Premium 

[引きこもり · Accepted solution]

Greyed out means the content is no longer available. This can happen if licensing agreements with the artist/labels, or ownership of rights, has changed. Hopefully it will reappear soon.

[Mario · Accepted solution]

Hey @dubbstaz,

Thanks for reaching out about this here in the Community.

We can confirm that what you experienced is something that Spotify doesn't have control over as the availability of music on the platform is determined by the artists and their music label or distributors.

If you'd like to know more about the possible reasons for any songs or albums to be unavailable on Spotify, it'd be great to take a look at this support site article. 

Hope you’ll find this info useful. Let us know if there's anything else we can help with!

[tbailey1712]

Hi Mario - I have a similar problem where around half of the songs on the Spotify app on my Pixel 2 are greyed out.

If I open up the same playlist on Spotify on my iPhone X, they are ALL AVAILABLE.

This isn't a content licensing issue.  It looks like and Android app issue.  Can you please dig in a little further on this and figure out why this is happening??

[tbailey1712]

I've figured out the problem.  This recently became more problematic because these same playlists were 100% greyed out when pulling them up on a Roku.  I've been a Spotify user for close to 10 years and this was one of my first playlists.  

So I manually rebuilt the playlist, adding all of the songs 1 by 1 into a new playlist.  And now 100% of the songs work.  None are greyed out.

There must be something in how Spotify stores playlist data on the back-end where really old playlists are no longer compatible with newer clients.

[DBul16]

Hey Spotify,  you guys had better fix this issue of unplayable songs before my subscription runs out, or it's Apple Music for me.

[Jeremy]

Hi there @DBul16,

Thank you for your reply in this thread.

Can you confirm if you followed the steps that's provided in the thread?

It would also be great if you can let us know which device/devices this occurs on.

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

Cheers!

[sapperzero]

What about songs that are not greyed out that wont play? I have a problem trying to play the artis Stone Sour. None of the songs are greyed out and NONE of the songs will play...

[Dian · Accepted solution]

Hey @sapperzero,

Thanks for posting in the Community.

If the songs aren't greyed out and you're not able to play them, it's a different issue altogether. Let's try performing a clean reinstall of the app as described here and see where this leads us. 

If there is no change, could you try a different account on your device and with a different device and your account? Also try switching the internet connection or turning off any VPNs, if you have any active.

Let us know how that went,

Cheers!