Dear Spotify, please let me unlink my Facebook account | Hacker News Reader

Dear Spotify, please let me unlink my Facebook account

eduardogarcia.xyz

746 pointsthewarpaint151 comments

I already unlinked my Spotfiy account from Facebook with this way: https://robblewis.me/convert-spotify-facebook-to-email-login...

No account migration of contacting support is needed. Just use your registered email account to reset (or in this case actually set) your account password and afterwards you can log in via your email+pw. Then in the Spotify preferences the button to disconnect Facebook becomes available.

Wow, thank you! I'll give this a shot tonight. I've been wanting to disconnect it for a while now as well.

When it says "disconnect Spotify in Facebook" does that mean deleting the Spotify app? Doing so warns me that it could potentially delete my account, which worried me enough not to go through with it.

Yeah, that's what it means (to delete the app from your Facebook).

I also got that warning but I ignored it and clicked through anyways. Confirmed that my Spotify account is still working via email/password login.

Awesome, thanks for the confirmation! You're much braver than me :)

Wow, just confirmed this works. I can now log in to Spotify via email/password. Thanks for this!

The only caveat is you will need to re-sign in to every device where you are currently signed in via FB.

That is expected behaviour though after unlinking :)

Cool that this works!

I was able to successfully unlink my Spotify from Facebook using this method without deleting my account or losing anything. Thank you for this.

Nice - this trick also works for Strava (for which I originally signed up using Google)!

I actually liked having Strava post to facebook, but now I get an error every time I try to tell it to post a run I just completed to facebook. I might have to go into facebook's app settings and remove Strava and add it back, or to disconnect it inside Strava and reconnect it.

This is a recent change on Facebook's behalf - apps are no longer permitted to post automatically on your behalf [1]. I can understand why they've done it (searching for that reference involved going through 3 pages of "how do I stop app X from posting on Facebook") - but for those who actually wanted that feature, it will be missed.

1. http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-no-longer-lets-apps-a...

Same here. Can confirm this method works like a charm.

This also helped with reverting to username from real name after unlinking.

thank you, I've just done it. Another one bites the dust.

Thank you so much for this.

I can confirm that this worked for me. Thanks a lot!

Worked for me - thanks.

Thanks for this! My husband has been trying to join our family account for like years (I didn't even know he wasn't part of it and that we were overpaying my $10 a month until 6-8 months ago), and couldn't b/c he signed up with a Facebook account (back in 2011, when Spotify required that for new US users who weren't like me and already had accounts because of ...reasons) and support's official suggestion was to open a new account and migrate playlists, which just sucks.

Hopefully this works!

Amazing! I've been looking for this for so long and even considered copying over all my playlists and manually doing this but this is a life saver.

Spotify has some really strange "won't fix" issues...

I'm on a Spotify family plan. I recently bought a Spotify gift card on sale, because you can usually apply those for a credit on subscription services.

Well, it turns out unlike the rest of their plans, Spotify Family doesn't support gift cards. I didn't even consider that it might not apply to all plans, and didn't check the fine print. Disappointed, I contacted support, who were happy to inform me there's a solution! I should cancel my plan (kicking all my dependents out), sign up for a _regular_ plan, apply my gift card to it, and _then_ sign up to the family plan again. This would, of course, mean that I'd have to reinvite my entire family to the plan.

They didn't really seem to understand why I was less than enthusiastic about this "solution".

In general, I always try to put my PM shoes on and try to evaluate what benefit they could possibly be receiving to ignore such a prominent issue that you can pretty much guarantee they are well aware of the issue.

That being said, I completely agree that this is pretty strange since I have not a single example that comes to mind in this case...

They could just be shitty devs? There's a reasonable amount of evidence for that: their android client is extremely buggy, and one day they deleted all my partner's playlists. On mac, I regularly have to close the client to force it to sync playlist changes, and sometimes playlist changes just disappear when I quit the mac client. I recently found 3.5g of old spotify updates sitting in ~/Library/Cache on an older, ssd space constrained mac. I have multiple performances of the same songs from several of my favorite artists; their client occasionally confuses different performances with the same name. You have to delete and re-add to get them to match correctly. I can continue...

Yeah, there is also the thing where they don't allow you to change your address when you are on family [0].

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/account_payment_help/account_...

Spotify still has a limit of 10.000 saved items. An album with 10 songs counts for 11 (10 song entries and 1 album entry). Meanwhile you can create 10.000 playlists with 10.000 songs no problem. So the saved items is obviously a very crappy (database?) design and they still refuse to fix it.

Very glad I have Apple Music now...

How does a saved item differ from a non-saved item? Is it equivalent to "downloaded"?

No. Saved means it appears when you browse to "My Library".

That is very odd. Why limit that at all?

With 10+ years experiencing designing software, my motto is to limit everything and then test at those limits. If you're not limiting things because "why limit this?", then you're going to run into some unhappy conditions in production (and once a user has added 1m songs, it would suck to just delete them out from under them).

Also, you can always raise the limit later if it really matters..

but the problem with Spotify is that they have not touched this arbitrary limit, there's no option to increase limits, and this has been this way since 2012, so it is by design.

And quite frankly, from a Software perspective, 10k entries in a database as a limit in 2018 feels small... especially when you consider how many people even listen to 10k entries in the first place. most have no clue about this arbitrary limit because they never hit it.

All I'm saying is that changing 10k to 100k is a significant difference in terms of music, and doesn't feel like it should be a significant difference in terms of data storage.

That is a strange issue. I have all of my music (sans the few tracks not on Spotify anymore) saved in a Starred playlist which I started 7 years ago when Spotify saved music via "stars." Even there though, I only have 7K tracks - how do you have 10k?!

I also have a lot of saved music as I tend to save whole albums instead of tracks. If I find an artist I like and want to listen to later, I'll often save their most popular album to come back to. It all adds up pretty quickly.

I hit that limit when I tried to import my Rdio collection and, similarly, switched to Apple Music. The Spotify UI is pretty awful for browsing a big list of albums, too.

I also hit this limit on Spotify. The super frustrating part to me was that it appeared to save your songs, but didn't. They would be starred until you left the page and came back.

I swapped to Google play music, though. They like to re-upload / move albums around and automatically remove them from my lists without telling me. Not particularly thrilled about that, either.

They also won't allow you to blacklist content (artists, songs, albums, etc) from your radio... truly frustrating given they force you to use their client.

Have you ever come across a Spotify issue on their support site which they have fixed? I personally have never seen this. Everything on there is pages and pages of people with the same issue and nothing from Spotify to address it. They really have zero interest in giving their customers (paying and otherwise) what they actually want. The only alternative is Google music which is probably worse!

I've been using it since beta, and I've seen it once.

After three years and 48 pages of community feedback, technology finally advanced far enough to implement the incredibly complex feature of preventing duplicate songs in a playlist: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Way-to-pr...

You still can't tell the Android Spotify app that you want to stream one quality on wifi, and one on cell data. This really seems like a no-brainer, and easy to implement, yet there has been no movement on this for years.

> seems like a no brainer

It is. Also, the iOS app has this so they’ve thought about it at least.

Another bizarre Spotify #wontfix is how you have (or at least had, this was two years ago) no recourse against someone with access to your account. e.g. Changing your password doesn't invalidate other sessions.

My friend had her password guessed (you can buy hundreds of hacked premium Spotify accounts online for <$1/each) and was powerless against the person who had been using her account. She had to basically listen to what they were listening to, it was a bit comical.

We emailed Spotify about this as it was happening and there was no way to lock this person out. Sorry! They advised her to create a new account and they would gift it with some duration of premium access.

To make things worse, she was the one who started our family-plan, and their customer support was unable to simply migrate the plan to her new account. She registered a new account and added it to the plan. This intruder was basically able to free-ride on our plan and force her our of her own account.

When I later saw the price of hacked Spotify accounts, I thought it was a great value!

There's a big "signout everywhere" button in settings now.

Crazily, I've heard the same issue on _Cloudflare_, of all services. And they're supposed to be in the security business!

A disgruntled ex-employee changed some of the settings on my website, and there was no way to kick them out after changing the password and adding 2-factor auth.

This is a very serious allegation and I need to know details. Please email me (jgc AT cloudflare DOT com) with details of the site and who you are alleging made such a change.

I sent you an e-mail describing the incident in detail, with a link to the support request I opened at the time of the incident.

I actually really do like Cloudflare a lot, for the record, so I'd be glad if it turned out to be something more innocuous. But at the time, Support said they'd look into it, and I got nothing but radio silence since then.

Thanks. I'll follow up internally.

I turned off FB "platform intergration" entirely, years ago, and it took me like 1 minute to google this up, which worked then and still works now. What's the big mystery?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Log-in-to-s...

Ever since then I use that "device name" (really more like a Spotify account number that stands in for a username) for everything. Logging in to Spotify clients built in to TV and roku, Android & IOS apps, and managing the account on the web site.

The account was created, Premium, with FB when that was the only option. Then I got that device name and disabled platform integration on FB so it's not possible for anything including Spotify to access my fb account, and it's been like that since 2012.

Disable "platform integration": https://m.facebook.com/help/211829542181913

This is awesome and should be widely known.

I would really like a tool that will go through my accounts-list (maybe from Last Pass, for example) which would crawl / determine / detect who is linking to whom and how. Then offer ways to unlink.

Finally, another thing I would like is an "identity creator" app - one that will shotgun out an entire set of accounts to be managed out as an identity.

For example - a tool that will go out and createa login/ID at some range/list of sites, say, for a new-born child.

It will go and setup and lock-down into as-private-as-possible an account across FB, HN, Reddit, DropBox, Google, etc. etc. etc.

And then keep those accounts locked and with a password-manager.

You can add/remove accounts across these systems as needed.

I would like to know why some people stopped using Facebook claiming that the main reason is "the recent databreach". If you don't want to use Facebook for how they handle your data in the first place, it seems perfectly fine to me. But, the data breach exploiting 3 vulnerabilities seems to be bad luck, I don't really think they're not committed to security in that sense. I'd like to know opinions from others.

IMAO Facebook IS a data breach where people voluntarily comply to, not just some vulnerabilities. Login with Facebook is a pretty stupid thing to do anyway, happily giving away even more data.. Cannot think of 1 valid reason to do that except for being too lazy to generate a new password.

That's the whole point of OpenID. One account with one credentials, multiple profiles on multiple sites. Lazyness is good. Much better than creating n acoounts on multiple sites using the same passwords, getting the weakest site to be compromised silently and hackers streaming back to your other accounts from that one. I'd rather trust fb.com 2fa security team over joeschmoe.com's one.

With the benefit of hindsight, that OpenID allows the ID authority to engage in tracking is a significant design flaw.

I've used facebook/google logins for some small projects in the past. In theory it should be easy. The user doesn't need to remember their username let alone a password, or even if they made an account already. They can just click to log in.

There were two main issues. The first is that people don't trust facebook or google even if they already were signed into their services. They didn't want to give them any more information.

The second was that it was a huge pain to maintain and test. Facebook and google changed how the services worked semi-regularly and it was not trivial to find their documentation on how to update everything (and during that time nobody could log into your service).

It should have been easy, but it wasn't and it was not worth it.

I actually refused to use Spotify for years because they required Facebook login. I gave in eventually as Rdio lost to Spotify in the market. Like many, though, I am deeply concerned about Facebook's policy direction and leadership. I did disconnect my Spotify account from my Facebook account the hard way (with customer support) a few months ago.

In general I am enthusiastic about federated signin, but I don't want to do business with Facebook.

What do you mean that Spotify requires Facebook login, I don't have a fb account and are using it just fine.

E: Missed the past tense. I just checked, you can sign up with your email address.

It used to. In fact Spotify shared the same auth database with Facebook (not oAuth, the literal same password - change it in FB, it changed in Spotify and vice versa)

Started doing FB only login in Sep 2011, but if you already had an email login you could keep it. Lasted for about a year then it was dropped.

Couldn't you just make a new, empty facebook account just for spotify login with no real personal info on it?

The recent data breach made many people realize that you're always just 1 instance of bad luck away from having a bunch of aggregated personal data stolen. It's pretty reasonable to decide you're better off removing yourself as a target than hoping Facebook will never again experience bad luck.

It's not reasonable at all. You're 1 instance of bad luck away from death. But that's hardly a reason to not leave home.

It's hardly a reason to leave home, but it's definitely a reason to, for example, not go skydiving.

You obviously can't remove all risk, but you sure can reduce it.

That might not be the best example, though. You are more likely to die driving to the airport than you are to die while skydiving. That is an activity which is similar to riding a roller coaster: it seems much more dangerous than it actually is.

> You are more likely to die driving to the airport than you are to die while skydiving.

Can you back that up? I thought this was true too but did a quick check anyway and I found skydiving death rates are 8 in a million but driving death rates are 7.1 per billion kilometers. Driving to the airport is probably more dangerous than your average drive, but it still looks like the car trip is less likely to kill you.

Presumably you get value from leaving home, and these people realized they weren’t getting value from Facebook.

Personally I have still friends I cannot switch to other platforms so I am stuck checking my Facebook messages once a month, but that is the only reason I still have an account, and I have unliked everything else from the service.

The likelihood of death isn't enough to keep me from from leaving my house, but it is enough to keep me from driving without buckling my seatbelt. Everyone has to do their own cost-benefit calculations, and the benefits of Facebook will not always outweigh the costs of having their personal data leaked.

> The recent data breach made many people realize that you're always just 1 instance of bad luck away from having a bunch of aggregated personal data stolen.

There is no such thing as data stolen but from the files on your hard drive. As soon as you upload something to the Internet you publish it and have no guarantee but hope people you don't want to see it won't notice it.

Data breaches make the news because the data wasn't supposed to be published. Just because a third party has my data on a computer doesn't mean it's public. Under your logic I've published all my banking data, whether I've used online banking or not.

All I've meant is that nobody should ever feel surprised when the data they've uploaded leaks. Now the people have realized it can leak, what amazes me is that they supposedly didn't realize it in advance. Just don't upload your naked pictures anywhere if you are going to feel seriously upset for longer than a couple of seconds once everybody sees them. That's just "a rule of a thumb". I absolutely don't mean companies like Facebook should not bother to protect users' data, I mean users should never actually take this protection seriously. The Facebook problem did not affect me because everything I've ever uploaded/written there is what I would not mind showing/saying on a TV.

> The Facebook problem did not affect me because everything I've ever uploaded/written there is what I would not mind showing/saying on a TV.

Does that include everyone who you've friended and everything they've put on Facebook, plus all the data they've inferred about you and your friends through tracking and other third-party sources?

If a company holds some information internally, and an unauthorised third party surreptitiously obtains that information, wouldn't you call that stealing?

Every direct mail list provider on the planet has just as much info on you as FB, and they have garbage security. This is an overblown risk comparably.

Source: Have bought DM lists of millions of people with full addresses, estimated salaries, employers, etc.

How bad do you think a risk needs to be to justify not using a service you probably don't enjoy anymore anyway?

To me the data breaches was just the final straw. Naively perhaps I never believed that they would be so careless with my data as it turned out. Then on top they can’t even keep it out of the hands of people who don’t have a contract with Facebook.

I think that it could be the GDPR that is now forcing Facebook to be more open about breaches, and previously they may have been keeping them secret.

> But, the data breach exploiting 3 vulnerabilities seems to be bad luck

To me it seemed to stem from at least one fundamentally alarming design problem on their part, not "bad luck". [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18203396

Did the OP actually try the support option? It took me less than a painless 10 minutes over chat with support (and most of that was me asking if the discover weekly model they had created for me would be ported over too, which seemed to have been highly tuned lately. The support person could not say and probably didn’t know what I was asking about)

OP here, haven't tried yet but I think my point stands that this is something enough users want to make it a proper feature rather than a "workaround". Might be wrong, though.

IMO they did come up with a solution for it, via support. I think it is interesting that people (seemingly) won’t try the solution because it involves talking to support and that has such a connotation of being a costly time sink from people’s terrible experiences with support contacts in the past.

Maybe that means Spotify needs to rethink their solution? Apparently they lost at least one subscriber to Apple Music in this thread because that person was adverse to contacting support and would rather switch services altogether. I wonder if that’s a real trend among people now.

Definitely agree that they need to rethink it. Look at their community center, how many hours has Support spent on doing this process manually, over and over again, in the last year alone?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/messa...

I tried contacting spotify about this and they told me to wait several months until my subscription expired and then create a new account.

I had my Facebook account linked to my Spotify account. I didn't create an account using Facebook, but linked them later on.

Even when I had a Facebook account linked, I could still login to Spotify using a username (a bunch of numbers) that I was able to dig out from the settings at some point.

I recently deleted my Facebook account, and everything went quite well. The app said my playlists was created by user "null" (they fixed this after a while and now displays the numbers which makes my username), but other than that there's been no changes. So, just deleting your Facebook account and let Spotify deal with it seems to work, but it require you to know the username (and password. I don't know how I got that, maybe it was the same password as the one I used before linking my Facebook account).

Obviously if you are getting rid of Facebook you would need to stop using Facebook to login to other things, but for people who are not getting rid of Facebook itself what are the security and privacy risks of using it for login for other services such as Spotify?

Does a Facebook breach let the attackers get into your Spotify account? Does it leak the existence of your Spotify account? Is there personal information from your Spotify account that can be gotten via a Facebook breach?

Same question for using any other OAuth provider, such as Google.

For me, I am in the processing of using Facebook less, trying to get rid of it. I still have some international friends where it is my ownly reliable way to contact them, so I have to keep the account. But I don’t want to use it for anything else in the event I can eventually sunset it entirely.

> Does a Facebook breach let the attackers get into your Spotify account?

It would be a security breach that resulted in that (access tokens compromised), rather than the oft-reported privacy breaches (profile data compromised), but yes. The recent security breach involving access tokens would not apply here, for example, because they were access tokens for Facebook, not for linked apps.

> Does it leak the existence of your Spotify account?

Yes, see https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications and search for Spotify.

> Is there personal information from your Spotify account that can be gotten via a Facebook breach?

If Facebook issued an invalid access token that authorized an attacker to use your Spotify account, they would be able to see anything you can see in your Spotify account. If your profile data was leaked, anything Spotify published to your Facebook profile might be accessible.

"Spotify" is a stand-in for any SSO app, and "Facebook" is a stand-in for any SSO provider, of course. There's nothing special about Spotify and Facebook here, it might as easily be FarmVille and Google.

> who are not getting rid of Facebook itself what are the security and privacy risks of using it for login for other services such as Spotify?

Facebook could decide arbitrarily, or by bug or mistake, to deny you access. Why use them at all? Convenience. Everyone is free to do the convenient thing. Just don't complain when your convenience fucks your over.

Did this awhile ago, simply contact support or DM https://twitter.com/spotifycares?lang=en and they will easily migrate all your stuff.

Yep also did this, took maybe 10 mins.

You can always ask Support and they'll happily migrate your data to a new account.

Yup, they did this for me back in 2015, and it was a really good customer support experience. I'd actually created a second account & asked them to close my original Facebook-linked one, but they offered to move across all my playlist data etc over to the new account so I didn't have to start over. And they checked in with me to make sure the data all looked good before deleting the other account. I was really happy with how they handled it.

I had unlinked my account using the officially supported method. It appeared to work. Months later, I noticed they were still updating my profile picture. I contacted them via Twitter. Four repeated explanations and screenshots later, they confirmed the accounts were silently still linked (despite no actual app authorization existing for Spotify in my Facebook account.)

Took them two weeks to manually unlink it (as in, they had to contact engineering and have them look at it). No explanation of how it happened. No explanation for how they were still accessing the data at all. I have no doubt others are affected.

Spotify Connect is brilliant, every single other thing about the Spotify experience is shoddy. (Like that song that just finished playing? Too bad, you can't see the playlist history without manually skipping back many tracks, etc)

I tried to cancel my paid account so I could create a new paid account without FB login. It was so frustrating that I’m now a happy Apple Music user.

Protip to companies: if your product is excellent, make account cancellation frictionless and the respect you show your users will pay dividends.

I had it migrated to a new paid account over chat with support in under 10 minutes - did you contact them? Arguably this should be a menu item somewhere, and maybe it is and I couldn’t find it, but my experience was very painless.

I like Spotify fine, and it's social feature doesn't bother me. I just use a private session if I want to hide what I'm currently listening to, but that's rare.

If 99% of people are OK with how it works, Spotify isn't going to change if they don't want to. And this is small compared to Google storing browsing, map, and search history, using it for ads, and nagging you if you opt out of it, or Apple and Google blocking things from their mobile platforms without a fair and consistent appeals process.

A little off topic, but I believe that Facebook, and to some extend Google, have screwed over any future “free” services with their behaviour. Personally, I will be very unlikely to sign up for ANY service that doesn’t offer a paid tier, in the future. I believe that this will hold true for others who have previously been quick to adopt new services and products. This will hinder competitors from gaining traction.

And for good reason. If there were a way to make money off a free service that didn’t involve selling user data, it would already have been bought by google.

Mostly agree.

Sadly as we've seen recently companies exist that are shady enough to both charge the user and collect data without asking at the same time.

So I guess the rule of thumb is true and I'll still look for paid services, but even then I guess we should be careful.

On the one hand yes, on the other hand there will always be a critical mass of people who will take 'free' if it's offered as a price point. It's just too compelling for that not to be true.

Spotify gave up on caring about their users a few years ago, I think. I uninstalled after the app forced the "DJ fade in / fade out" between every track -- including between movements of Beethoven's symphonies. (No, the toggle to turn that off never worked for me. No, they never replied to my attempts to let them know how awful it was.)

(No, I'll never go back to their service.)

Gapless playback without crossfades was a must-have feature for me and was one of the reasons I migrated to Spotify. It continues to work for me on both Mac OS and iOS.

Never could get it to work on Samsung, Apple 7, or Pixel.

The most frustrating Spotify problem for me is the link between mobile / desktop play queues. I've moaned about it many, many times on the forums and there's a giant thread of people moaning about the same thing, but it's been years without resolve.

Basically, if I don't force-close the Spotify app on my Android before I get my laptop open on the same wifi, the phone will overwrite any play queue on my desktop. I exclusively use Spotify on my phone in the gym. I'll choose one album at a time and play it through while I work out. My laptop is for work - I'll maybe spend 15 minutes every few days queueing 10 or so new albums I want to try. Utterly maddening when you forget to close the app, go to Spotify and you're blasted with gym music and you've lost your carefully curated play queue.

Why not make a playlist? Seems more durable

I hate this too! For me, tho, the worst part is that they're not even consistent. I never know if the computer will pick up whatever I'm playing in the phone: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. I don't want to check if my phone is connected to the same wifi for it to work.

Back when I used Rdio, the behavior was to keep all devices/tabs synced. It was consistent. It worked. When I wanted to keep diferent sessions I used playlists. I could work around it.

But with Spotify it's a mess. It doesn't sync correctly when I want, but only when I don't want.

Could you disable Spotify Connect? I don't actually have this problem myself. The playlists always remain separate until I explicitly select the other device via Spotify Connect.

Just make a playlist. AFAIK desktop and mobile apps both have the ability to one-click add albums to saved songs or playlists.

I love the combined cue, especially when hosting parties. Let guests cue songs from laptop and then adjust the order according to whom I like more (:

I select an album and play it straight in the gym - as in type in the artist, choose the album, double click and play. No playlist needed.

I suppose I could continue to create / delete playlists on the desktop, but it seems like I shouldn't have to. I'll go through the new releases on Friday / Tuesday, queue all the ones I want to try and listen to them one after the other. If I like them, I'll save them to a playlist or add the album to my library. If it doesn't grab me, I won't bother. Regardless, even if I'd queued a playlist, the mobile is still going to overwrite my queue. I just want an option to disassociated the two devices.

You just identified a wish-list-item I have for music apps: Location aware playlists:

The device would be aware where it is located - or moving via either gps, accelerometer or wifi ssid visibility or even an ibeacon.

The device will then know that it should play from selected sets/playlists that I have tagged appropriate for that location.

I would like this in a video library management app as well.

Basically, the content most likely to be relevant to my current location or activity should float to the top of the playlist or click-field.

All content should obviously be available, but preference to play a cetain list over another based on location or activity without overt action from me.

Kind of like an "ok google - I am now running so play my running lists" and "ok google - I just arrived at my office so either STFU or play my worklist"

"Looks like you just got on bart list"

How much battery life are you willing to pay for that?

Google Music does that already. But I know, Google isn't fashionable on HN. In fact, there will be another revolt - Google is creepy!

Also, it would be nice if Spotify could bring back the ability to follow friends without requiring Facebook.

You can still do it. I follow 10 or so friends, and I've never linked facebook. The mechanism for adding friends is needlessly obtuse though. You need to add spotify:user:<username> in the search box to find them, then you can follow.

My biggest gripe is they removed the ability to send songs to friends.

Super, thanks!

Interesting that my blog post which is now 7 years still is not outdated: https://jeena.net/spotify-facebook

Back then I stopped using Spotify because they forced every new user to use Facebook to log in.

An unexpected downside of oAuth rears its ugly head.

I mean the loss of trust in the provider is an obvious downside of centralized authentication right?

The “unexpected” part is the loss of trust in Facebook as a provider.

I would argue trusting Facebook with anything was obviously going to end in tears but I admit I’m not a normal user.

Agree, the problem in regards to spotify is that for a while spotify required facebook for new accounts.

The disconnect that led to that decision is absolutely mind blowing. To make it even more surreal lots of people, even on HN, defended it.

Yeah I just didn’t use Spotify until I could sign up with email. It kind of surprised me they were able to gain as much traction as they did with what I viewed as a user-hostile action right at signup.

Spotify activity in the early days was super prominent in the Facebook activity feed and that weird mini feed they used to have. So I think they probably got more new customers from that angle as they might have lost from the login limitation.

You can always provide a way for the user to convert oAuth accounts into your own system. No idea why Spotify hasn't done already, this problem has existed on Spotify for many years now.

Every website should let you change the way you sign-in (e.g. from Facebook/Google/whatever to pure email/username and back and also change your e-mail address and username) at any time you want.

Spotify is an interesting one. A long time ago I had an Outlook account which was linked to my Facebook which was linked to my Spotify. I later deleted my Facebook and my Outlook account as well, completely forgetting about my Spotify account. This year I re-registered for Outlook and was able to get exactly the same address (I guess it had just been long enough?) and was then able to reset my password for Spotify and log straight back in.

Needless to say I no longer use Spotify at all.

> A long time ago I had an Outlook account which was linked to my Facebook which was linked to my Spotify.

I suppose you mean it the other way around? The way you're describing it suggests that you could use Spotify to reset your Facebook password, which is either confusing or terrifying. :)

Hi, we don't care.

Sincerely, Spotify

Yeah, nothing listed here has worked for me. The issue is I had two accounts with the same email address one with Facebook one w/o. Not sure how it happened but if I try to reset the password of my account with my email address I immediately receive a "welcome back to facebook" email.

So, they are keeping the OID information somewhere. I've asked, begged, pleaded, and demanded for them to fix this and I've gotten absolutely nowhere. It is infuriating.

Have you tried changing your facebook email address?

While it isn't really straightforward, Spotify support will transfer all your songs, playlists, followers and if I recall correctly also your followed artists to a new account. Another possibility is for them to delete your old Facebook-linked account so you can create it again after which they'll also transfer all your old data. It isn't an ideal solution but at least you won't have to worry about losing your collection.

I don't have Facebook, and I desperately want to get rid of the panel on the right telling me to login. So annoying. Apart from that really enjoy Spotify.

Assuming you’re referring to the ‘See what your friends are playing’ panel; on macOS it’s View Menu -> Uncheck ‘Friend Activity’. The right hand panel should then close.

On windows, but I will give it a try, thanks for the tip

Edit: You are a champion, that worked!

I was able to unlink FB my account with help from customer support. I had to provide details about my payment. They then basically deleted my account and created a new one and copied the playlists. There were some issues with Discover Weekly and Daily Mix playlists, but they resolved after a couple of weeks. I guess the process could be smoother and more automated, but I am glad now don't use FB login anywhere.

Now, if we can just garner enough user support to get Spotify to remove the 10,000 song limit, that would be awesome.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Your-Music-Incre...

Google Play has a similar issue too, though it's quite a bit higher. I think it might be around 100k songs is the max you can add to your library (and of course, adding this many also seems to make it slow down a lot, making it difficult to remove them).

OP here, instead of replying to individual comments I'll sum it up here. As the post states I am aware of the "contact support" workaround. I haven't tried it yet but I think my point stands that this is something enough users want to make it a proper feature. Even if right now it only takes a 10 minute call to Support. Might be wrong, though.

I created my first Spotify account in 2011 I'm pretty sure the ONLY way to authenticate was Facebook. There's no way I would have used Facebook rather than email. Years later I realized how absurd this was, found out you can't unlink them, and just made a new account. Spent a couple of days transferring my playlists.

I've had a Spotify account for just as long and never had it linked with Facebook, purely because I didn't have Facebook at the time. I just log in with id and password.

For about a year you were unable to create a new spotify account without a facebook account.

Accounts created before that were unaffected.

FB login only started in sep 2011, and lasted for about a year before it was dropped.

It’s literally the only reason I still have a Facebook account. Couple that with Alexa picking out the worst version possible of the song I requested (“Master of Puppets - live by not Metallica on Spotify”) but seems to get it right with prime music; I’m about to drop it.

I also created my Spotify account with Facebook. When I wanted to unlink them I just sent an email to support and they did it pretty quickly with no issues. I haven't used FB and Spotify for years now, so things might have changed, but OP should try and do the same.

I made that "Login with Facebook" mistake too. Somehow I can login with some numeric username and password, but Spotify still downloads my recent facebook profile pic, what I don't like, because I want no connection to Facebook whatsoever.

Literally created another account last night and transferred all my playlists. Was actually straightforward on the desktop (drag and drop playlists from old to new account. Lost all of my history, but w/e.

Removing/blocking followers would also be appreciated.

I created my Facebook account with my parent's email address back in the day (when I turned 13). Today it has been completely unlinked, but Spotify is still connected with that old email account. There's no way to actually change that.

Also please let me opt out of social feed - not just for 6 hours on mobile, permanently. It is total BS that I as a paying customer am required to be "social" on your app.

I never use oauth unless I can avoid it. I’ve got LastPass and that makes creating a custom login per site trivial, so I have no need to hand more data to some oauth provider.

And also I cannot change my name if I will not add facebook account. It is very ridiclous. They are very huge startup but they did not much time for adding a simple form. :P

Got the same problem here. I deleted the facebook account. now i have to login with my user id and password. How can they miss something so simple.

Does anyone know how to do this with StackExchange?

A quick email to support helped me do this a couple of years back. Don’t know if it should be any more trouble nowadays

Trying to click through to this piece from HN on Facebook tells me this link is malicious. Sour grapes on FB’s part?

Not at all. It's my personal blog, has very low traffic, it's only a basic HTML+CSS page, probably hits a few spam rules here and there.

This is what fake FB accounts are for.

I’d like to be able to do this on Instagram with my inactive Facebook account

I already did this with the help of their customer support two years ago.

Do what I did to unlink it: delete your Facebook account.

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