Error when playing yet great internet performance/no traffic blocked on firewall

[awparker85]

Plan: Premium - Family Plan

Country: United States

Device: (multiple) iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 12, Sonos, Macbook Air 2021

Operating System (iOS 15, macOS Monterey)

My Question or Issue:

In the last few days, I have been unable to use Spotify on any of my devices. I have excellent internet performance on those same devices
(400mbps down/100mbps up/30ms latency on average). I'm not sure what has changed, but a week ago this didn't happen. I also have a network firewall where I can monitor anything blocked and nothing is causing it there either.

When I use cell instead of wifi, it works instantly. I have home-wide VPN, but as I mentioned it doesn't block activity and it has consistently excellent performance. All other services I use, other music services, gaming, video streaming, etc work great. I have noticed that when VPN comes up here in the forums, the Spotify responses talk about turning it off to improve "performance" but that isn't true. In my case, performance is excellent. What's happening is that Spotify is ACTIVELY blocking my activity. Spotify talks about "not supporting VPN" but there's nothing to support.. They are ACTIVELY blocking those IP addresses. I have an active authorized session, I'm a paying premium member, but they block my activity simply based on the IP address. I don't want the entirety of the internet to mine my IP address for advertising so that means I can't use Spotify?

I will also say, Spotify offers premium services wanting to attract premium users with disposable income, but I find it funny if they don't think those same premium users can't easily leave for another service when their privacy is violated. Why wouldn't they just make a "private listening" feature for premium users that allows for this. If Spotify is making me choose between internet privacy or their service that makes me want to stop being a customer anyway.

I'd love to be wrong on this. Maybe there is a setting or something I can do to troubleshoot. Any ideas to troubleshot or get around this?

[Elena]

Hey there @awparker85,

Thanks for getting back to us.

Can you let us know exactly what behavior you're getting on your devices - does the app never load or do you get any error messages?

It's a good idea to try and restart your router and your other devices to sync things up.

It's possible that the issue is caused by a VPN, there are a few reasons for that, for example the app content and features varying between countries, so we can't guarantee optimal performance when using restricted networks.

We'll be on the lookout for your answer and we'll see is we can solve this with you.