Removed/Disappearing Spotify Songs

[jordansearle8]

My Question or Issue

This has been going on for years now; Spotify keeps removing songs randomly. It must be because of licensing or disagreements with the artists etc. Whatever the reason, the users should be notified when these are removed if we have the songs in our libraries, liked songs or playlists. It's incredibly frustrating paying for a music service that can just mess about with your library without your knowing. 

The song, or album, or EP you remove may be someones favourite and without them knowing it's gone from their collection. This wouldn't happen back with physical buys and iTunes etc, but that's all dead now.

I understand contracts or agreements with artists may change and for whatever reason the songs have to be removed, but I just think there should be feature where the person with those songs in their library are then notified. As they might then look to replace it on a YouTube playlist or even buy/download it.

However if they don't know, they can't do this. They just have to randomly stumble across the missing content or figure it out down the line, which isn't ideal for anyone.

I know you don't want to highlight your problems, like losing music but the users should know what's going on with the music and the libraries their paying for because these are essentially lifetime subscriptions to make up for these no existent physical libraries. 

Give us the notifications - make it happen!

[Jeremy]

Hit here @jordansearle8,

Thank you for reaching out here in the Community.

We understand how this would be useful, but currently due to how content distribution on Spotify is set up, this is not possible. It would also require a great amount of resources to check each of our over 356 million users libraries for this, which is not something we have the capacity to do at this moment.

We hope that you understand. Hopefully, this will change in the future.

Take care!

[striker_man1]

As an senior/architect-level software engineer, heavily familiar with both mysql performance and mobile performance, I can tell you that your statement is objective false. Because you need not do all the processing server side. On a high-level, this feature could be accomplished (with ease) by feeding all recently removed titles (similar to how you might feed titles to users when they search a song), and have the cross-checking (of each removed song against a the user's library) be implemented client side to check for matches. This should be very cheap, and could even be an optional/opt-in, and be implemented with thresholds to prevent both server & client-side performance issues in certain edge cases. Granted, I don't know all the numbers, but this would be very feasible assuming frequency of song droppages is less than 100k titles per month, and assuming the average user library size is under 1k. But that's the easy option, there's loads of alternate, more scalable, solutions.

All that said, I think the real reason this feature will never be implemented, is because it makes Spotify look bad, and they'd rather not be transparent about their own shortcomings to secure titles. The songs obviously already get removed from the user's library today. So a solution is already 99% implemented. And client-side detection of song-droppage from a library would be child's play at that point. Simply cache the playlist title id's and meta data client side, and cross check it in the background once a day upon launching the app.

Don't blame Jeremy either. He's just a misinformed moderator.

[journeyman163]

I had some "Scorpions" song saved, (not sure if I downloaded them or not but dont think so) now one of my favourite tracks is no longer available why is this? The traack is "A moment in a million years"