Change of username - be trans inclusive!

[Malte_G]

I wrote to Spotify back in 2019 about this and they still haven’t listened so I feel I need to bring it up again, since I believe there’s a serious reason to enabling change of username.

I would like Spotify to enable changing user name, me as a trans person get a lot of dysphoria being reminded of my dead name, which I used when started my spotify account. This is not trans frriendly at all! And I know I'm not the only one. Yes there are work arounds but i can still SEE name, it's still there, unchangable atm. Please Spotify, fix this, I do believe it's in your interest to be trans inclusive.

[Darth_GTB]

Hi, I can see many other reasons why somebody would want to change their username. Maybe they changed their mind, maybe they opened a business and want the previously personal account to be the business one, maybe they made a typo...

I'm a software developer. I have no connection to Spotify and I don't really know how they deal with usernames under the hood, but this may or may not be possible to achieve easily.

Depending on how they set this up, your username might be your identification in the platform and that might be an oversight from their original design back when the company was founded and a technical limitation that can't be dealt with without completely redesigning the core of the authentication process, which could bring lots of issues for everyone.

Your username might be just like the portion of you e-mail address before the @. Something that is impossible to change within their current architecture.

That being said, this might not be impossible to overcome. YouTube for instance has recently given us the choice to change our username (the text used in their new @ handle). In their case, the core of the account is your Google Account and not the username and that's why you can change that there.

I just wouldn't expect they acting on this any time soon or at all, because this is a private company working on proprietary software. They will only work on issues that bring them monetary value and low risk of going offline.

In any case, it's always a good idea not to use your real name as a username/handle in websites that aren't official or serious... I invented one many years ago and use it everywhere. This handle is sort of my online personality.

[rynorshine]

I'm with you on this. Even if I change my "display name" my deadname can be seen in the link to my profile and my playlists. It's frustrating and ridiculous quite honestly. Saying they can't be changed because "our usernames are used to identify us" makes no sense because almost every other platform that uses usernames as a way to identify users allows them to be changed.

[Darth_GTB]

@rynorshine, I absolutely agree with you. They definitely should look into it. But what I meant is that Spotify might have not been built like "most websites". One clear example is sharing a playlist. I don't have playlists, so I don't know what the link looks like, but if your username shows up in the link, that's a good indicator they might have this issue. If you change it, all links you have already shared will become broken. If it's a numerical ID, then they can easily and safely allow changing it without much problem. That number would be the actual identification of the account and changing the username wouldn't break anything

But again, that's not impossible to overcome. They could change the identification to a number and have all your past and present usernames stored in your account, so older links don't break and other users don't take your unused usernames. Although feasible, and seemly simple, that is a dangerous change that isn't actually simple and that would take months between designing, implementing and testing.

Still, I hope they do look into it, because that's a basic feature - as you said - most websites have. And it's nice to have. Nobody likes having to create a new account just because they don't like their username anymore. I have a few accounts in other websites that suffer from the same issue. I just had to create a new account because I regretted my original username...

[TheDaydreamer]

My username is literally gibberish because I had originally used Spotify for a free trial. When I went back years later I didn’t realize it was the same account so I’m stuck like that because I don’t want to move all my playlists lol. I definitely wish we could edit our usernames. 

[At1as]

Agreed, I'm in the position of having a Spotify account that's existed since well before I transitioned and was created when your username probably was just pulled from the email address you signed up with and as a result, it includes my deadname the same as rynorshine. 

Appreciate your explanation above Darth_GTB, but interestingly the username only seems to be included in the shareable link to my actual profile - playlists look like they just produce a numerical string. For example, this is a link to one of my playlists: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7IdMkL5qhIG74YP3DY2jDh?si=62d14233a4ca4f12

I don't even want to change it to anything particularly specific, I would be fine with just a random string of numbers as newer users seem to get. I just went on to the chat function because I was like surely they can just do something on the back end to associate my account with a random string of numbers for identification and that would replace the username I have currently but they are still saying that even that is impossible. It's really, really frustrating that I'm genuinely having to consider throwing away years of listening history etc just for something that seems like it should be a doable wee change in certain circumstances.

[Darth_GTB]

@At1as, thanks for your input. This indicates this should be less traumatic to fix on their end. The playlist is its own entity then

[Mitre226644]

This is very doable. 

 

 

[enyaashamyaza]

This would also be useful for divorced people, and people who would like to share their playlists online without getting doxxed.