This has happened a few times before, and I've seen it around the forums without a satisfactory solution.
Basically, I've been listening to spotify with no problems at all, and then it suddenly decided to lose track of all of the music I have downloaded. I think it happened after I got re-connected to the internet today. I saw a momentary notification of "Checking with Spotify" or something along those lines, and a little later noticed that the slider that dictates whether or not to download a playlist is set to "off" for everything in my library, including "My Library" and all of my playlists. This happened twice in two weeks last summer when I was in Asia; luckily I was close enough to civilization to re-download the stuff I cared about.
This time, I am on a boat near the Antarctic Circle and do not have the bandwidth or capacity to re-download my music. Bandwidth is $90/GB down here, so it would cost me roughly $1,200 to re-download everything, and would likely take a few days.
When I look at the App Storage data in Android, there are a full 14GB of storage used for these songs, but they cannot be played from my library while offline. If I click on them, the abum pictures all come up, but they will not start streaming. There is some broken link, and I need a way to fix it.
Here's the criteria where spotify thinks this issue should happen:
- You've downloaded music to more than 5 devices. Nope. I have 5, and the oldest of those is not this device.
- You haven't been online with Spotify at least once in the last 30 days. Was online with full bandwidth less than a week ago; on metered, slow connections for the past week.
- If you've recently reinstalled the app. Nope
- Your Spotify app needs updating. Nope, most recent version was Feb. 6th, I have that installed.
- Your SD card (if your device has one) has become compromised (dislodged, corrupted, etc.) I don't have one.
- The content's no longer available on Spotify. It's literally everything I have.
- Tracks in some playlists are updated regularly, meaning tracks might be removed. This is "My Library" in addition to all of those playlists.
If there is not a way to re-access this data, which I know to be stored on my device, I need a reason why. Searching through the forums, this has been a problem for literally years, and the only solution given has been to "reinstall spotify and re-download the songs". This is not an option, nor should Spotify delete my music after a couple days off of the mainland. I'm supposed to be able to go 30 days without checking back in, and instead I was greeted with a blank music library.
Do you know how boring it can be to be on a boat for days at a time without music? To give an idea of how slow the internet is down here, it took me 50 minutes to navigate to this page (after needing to confirm my e-mail, of course), and I am not even certain that I can submit this amount of text in a form.
I've been paying for Spotify for roughly 7 years, if memory serves. I cannot believe this is such a common phenomenon that the diagnosic procedure is "re-install the app and download everything again". Please, give me a better path.
Device:
Pixel 2
Location:
65S, 64W