Hidden music?

[Tanarotte]

Hello

1)

I've been searching for an artist on spotify "Kalafina" in my cliant and there is absolutely no results. When i tried google, there are SEVERAL playlists and direct links to this artist albums, even announcement of the type:  "hey this new album [xxx] is now available on spotify", yet my player doesnt see or can access anything.

Only when i logged on the website and added this artist to followed manualy on website it then appeared on my followed people list in the windows player yet . . i can't still access or even see any music tracks or albums.

This is strange, **bleep**ty, and somewhat sneaky behaviour. Normaly when soemthing is not availble in my country or for some reasons blocked, its just greyed out on the track list, and displays a reason why . . .this time however its completely hidden from view and search.

2) Strangly on that sneakly hidden artist page i noticed in "Similar artists" another one, Kanon Wakeshima which i did listen to a month ago and had in my playlist yet this time the artist didnt have any avatar. I then checked my playlist for the music and found her tracks MISSING from the playlist without ANY f**** information, announcement, popup, mail, ANYTHING.

Spotify, you should learn from steam. stuff added to users "library/playlist" should remain there and be accessible at ANY point no matter what because that user might have PAID YOU MONEY to listen to these in higher quality and maybe even downloaded them.

Secondly, i find the fact spotify modify peoples playlists and libraries without ANY agreement even from paid users, any, even the smallest **bleep**tiest information or notice about it a bad behaviour and borderline illegal. After all if any users paid sub and had their tracks from playlist removed, they lost access to content they paid for, therefore can demand refund.

3)So . . .people cant even tell anymore and have to discover by ACCIDENT if several or more songs were removed completely from their playlist? My playlist is small, about 80 songs and i only found that by accident. Usually listening on Shuffle means u cant tell if track order is the same or if something is deleted, and it would look like Spotify team would PREFER if you didnt know you lost your

stuff. 

I seriously consider moving my playlist to another music streaming service. I believed spotify would hold my favorite song playlist for ever so i wont ever have to re-build my playlist again. I am disappointed.

PS. whenever i post or modify a message i get this **bleep**: 

Ps2. even if i edit this msg and delete the unwanted script code it automagicaly re-appears. Wtf is wrong with you spotify ;-/, its like 3 major disappointments this day. .

[Peter__]

To clarify a few of your points:

If no content from an artist is available in your country (and all content varies between countries) then you will not be able to find them using the search function in the Spotify client. It will only return content available to you (otherwise you would get a HUGE list of greyed out tracks).

When content gets removed from Spotify (which is never down to Spotify, they are not in control of the available content that is up to the rights holders), you are correct you will not get notified. However, the tracks will remain in your playlist and will re-appear if they get re-added. You can see those tracks still in your playlist if you go to Edit/Spotify > Preferences > Playback > Untick "Hide Unplayable Tracks".

[Tanarotte]

If no content from an artist is available in your country (and all content varies between countries) then you will not be able to find them using the search function in the Spotify client. It will only return content available to you (otherwise you would get a HUGE list of greyed out tracks)

 That information is NOT reasuring at all sir. Saying "oh they hide it from you because you would be annoyed to see sudenly half of your playlist be missing". That is not very ideal for consumer, especialy the one who paid Spotify for better versions. Its anti-advertisement of the platform. Please note sir that huge amounts of users use spotify free and deal with ads JUST for two simple reasons:

They do NOT want to loose their playlists and music (due to hdd failures, formats, viruses, not enough space on hdd for masive libraries etc).

They do not want manualy move their (often huge) libraries from device to device

Then again it makes absolutely NO sense to hide them even from search, only thing it does it protects old arse shadowy labels from burning down in riots due to people getting annoyed of stuff they want being "selectivly available"

When content gets removed from Spotify (which is never down to Spotify, they are not in control of the available content that is up to the rights holders)

 See thats the problem. Instead of working with artists themselves, letting them self publish their work (because they have ALL rights to do whatever they wish with their own content), cut the middle man entirely Spotify forces them, FORCES THEM no less to use shadowy publishing, agregating and label corporations that eat vast amounts of money and dont give a flying f...duck about consumer.

The fact Spotify have absolutely no controll over their own service is extremly worrying. It means at any point in time there is no warranty of content, their "owners" can remove everything from spotify at a moment notice and leave 10milion paid users with 0 music. Massive amount of refund requests and lawsuits would swiftly follow.

Spotify needs to protect themselves, the user, the content and the original author, exactly like steam does. There should be a warrantly that users will not loose access to stuff they previously had paid access to.

Spotify needs to be the ONLY moderator of availablility of its content with changes being done on direct request of an author. Users should be at least informed via mail whenever music has been enabled or disabled for them.

And these country specific contracts . . . seriously. . . 20 years ago when u had to print CDs and each country had different prices for them, languages, and requirements it made sense to have a license for just a specific country. At least it slowed down import of the "cheaper" version "designed" for different country. Authors of the music couldnt just print out 1m music cds to sell in shops either. Nowadays we have internet, globalisation, digital music and pretty much no borders yet we still freaking get situations where half of european union is revoked access to stuff because of ancient **bleep**ty contracts made by shadowy label corps, that do what ever they possibly can to survive on ancient arse policies. Its like they specificaly team up and decided to split authors profit among their "friendly label friends" from different countries, because they can and its free money. This has to change . . . and spotify has to work on it too.