Older Playlists not displaying in search, profiles, or saved lists

[hoshuajiggins]

Plan: Both free / premium
Country: US
Device: Mac Desktop, iOS app, at least

Multiple ways to confirm issue described below:

1) Go to NPR Music's profile on Spotify. Click "Public Playlists". Scroll through the list and attempt to find "NPR Music's New Music Friday" playlist with 50k subscribers. It doesn't exist. 
2) Search for "NPR Music's New Music Friday" on Spotify. You won't find it unless you've re-favorited it recently.
3) Look through your own saved playlists and try to recall if there's any years old playlists you had saved that no longer show up. I bet they will behave similarly as this one.

Here's the URI to the playlist I'm mentioning (it's not the only one affected), just so you can see that it does indeed exist, is still actively maintained, has 50k subscribers, and absolutely doesn't show up in search results or on NPR's account until you force it to populate into your cache: 5X8lN5fZSrLnXzFtDEUwb9 

Lengthy description of issue:
I've stumbled upon what I consider to be a major bug. Older playlists are simply no longer showing up in numerous places unless you directly visit them via URL and save them (even if you were already subscribed).

I noticed this on my own account last week when an old playlist I use to embed music into my website no longer showed up in my saved playlists. It also did not show up in the "Public Playlists" link on my profile. If I visited it directly, I could interact with it... But it didn't exist in any other form. I assumed it was some sort of soft archival of an inactive years old playlist.

Today, I'm convinced this is a MASSIVE bug. An artist I work with was featured on "NPR Music's New Music Friday" playlist this weekend, which has 50k subscribers and it actively kept up every Friday. When we checked Spotify Artists app over the weekend we noticed there were no plays generated from the playlist, while numerous smaller publication playlists they were featured on showed up. I tried to search for the playlist and discovered it doesn't show up in search results. 

I found the direct link and saved it again and it showed up on my personal profile under saved playlists on the web app, but still didn't show on mobile or desktop apps. Still nothing under search. After a few hours, it finally showed up under my saved playlists on the other apps, and now it shows up in search results too. However, it still doesn't show up on NPR Music's profile under "public playlists". 

I switched to my alternate business account and tried to find it again. Nothing. Doesn't exist unless I have the direct link.

I posted it on some dev Slack groups I'm in and asked them all to search for "NPR Music's New Friday Playlist" and over a dozen people reported back that they couldn't find the playlist. A playlist with 50k subscribers doesn't show up in search results, but 7 playlists with 1-30 subscribers does. 

All I can assume is there's some poor caching rules implemented on older playlists that's causing these playlists to disappear from search results, profiles, and even older active subscriber's saved playlists. The only way to get it to show up for you again is to go via direct URL and actively save the playlist again and eventually the caches will populate it again for that specific account.

[andrewjrhill]

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@hoshuajiggins wrote:

[...] An artist I work with was featured on "NPR Music's New Music Friday" playlist this weekend, which has 50k subscribers and it actively kept up every Friday. When we checked Spotify Artists app over the weekend we noticed there were no plays generated from the playlist [...]

Wow! The implications here are huge. This would seem to imply that there are artists out there are who most certainly missing out on income due to hidden playlists. That's unfortunate, I feel bad for the artist you're working with.

[hoshuajiggins]

Absolutely. Getting featured by something like NPR Music is an achievement. It's tarnished a good bit by learning that a major Spotify bug is preventing people from actually being able to listen. 

[SomethingNew71]

I am experiencing the exact same issue when searching that and some of my own older playlists.