Spotify broken, loads home but can't play

[ApiDoesntShowDevices]

Suddenly the Windows desktop app is broken. First all songs turned gray. I restarted and the home page loads, I see my playlists, recommended stations, etc, but the library on the left is empty. Clicking a playlist from home (my own or recommended) shows 3 loading dots, then "Couldn't find that playlist". Search works, eg "Tupac" shows songs/albums, but playing any song does nothing.

I uninstalled and redownloaded and reinstalled Spotify. I rebooted Windows. I tried disabling the GPU even though things render fine. I did ctrl+shift+R to reload, many times. I looked at the log files, nothing there. I reset app data. I turned offline mode on and off again. None of that worked.

Network communication is working, since after reinstall it asks me to login, I do, then it continues to the home screen, which shows my music. Also search works, so it can communicate. The web player works, so my account is fine. During web playback the desktop app doesn't show any playback. The play button is a pause icon and the mouse turns to a disabled icon over it.

What is going on?!

Plan: Premium

Operating System: Windows 10

[Vasil]

Hey @ApiDoesntShowDevices,

Sorry to see this has happened!

Are you by any chance using any VPN services? If you are, try switching them off or adding an exception for the Spotify app.
If this doesn't help, see if clearing the hosts file would make a difference.
You can also try performing a complete clean reinstall of the app as described here. For the last step - in case you've downloaded the current version of your app from the Microsoft app store, try downloading it from our website instead (or vice-versa).

Hope this helps! Keep us posted 🙂

[ApiDoesntShowDevices]

Thanks for the response Vasil.

I am running Tailscale, which is an overlay network (sort of like a VPN). If I turn it off (by stopping the Tailscale service) then Spotify works! So it's definitely that, which is a great find -- but why? Tailscale doesn't affect normal networking, it just handles communication on a private IP range (for me that's 100.100.x.x).

Spotify traffic does not go through Tailscale, it goes through my normal Ethernet connection. Something about me having an additional network interface (Tailscale) is causing only some Spotify traffic to fail. This seems like a problem on the Spotify side of things.

Everything else works fine, including online gaming. It all goes through my normal network interface. The only traffic that goes through Tailscale is when I connect to Tailscale IPs. It's really convenient, except for Spotify not working.

Any ideas on how to resolve this?

[ApiDoesntShowDevices]

I found Spotify says to turn off any VPN, probably for DRM reasons:

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/abuse-detection/

Tailscale is an overlay network that uses VPN-like encryption to create secure, peer-to-peer connections. Unlike a VPN, its purpose is not to mask your location or bypass geographic restrictions. Tailscale is for connecting to private network services, not for routing all traffic through another computer. Ideally Spotify is able to differentiate between an overlay network and a traditional VPN.

The Spotify web interface continues to work fine, so I don't see allowing the desktop interface to work as being any different. Desktop Spotify is just Electron + the web interface. I like having Spotify in its own app window rather than taking up space in my browser tabs (even if pinned).

[Dessi]

Hey @ApiDoesntShowDevices,

Thanks for the detailed information and apologies for the delay!

Our app is designed to work with standard network configurations. The introduction of an additional network interface, even one that doesn't handle Spotify traffic directly, can sometimes interfere with the app's functionality. This is possibly why you experience issues with the app.

Hope this clears things up.

[ApiDoesntShowDevices · Accepted solution]

I finally fixed this! The problem is that the Tailscale interface had too low of a metric. You can see that by running "route print". I saw Tailscale IPs with metric 5 while 0.0.0.0 was 35. To fix it in Powershell run "Get-NetIPInterface" and not the "ifIndex" then:

Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex 19 -InterfaceMetric 500

Where 19 is the ifIndex and 500 is a number higher than your other route metrics. After this Spotify works fine when Tailscale is up. I've been taking Tailscale up and down for months, so I'm very happy to get this fixed!