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Comment by mgoetzke | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

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It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse

It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions.

I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.

For me this is one of the most compelling reasons to own non-DRM'd physical media: its content is no longer subject to the whims of corporate bullshit after the point of sale. Replacing songs within albums with other versions is appalling.

Sometimes Spotify swaps them for others by the same artist. One of my favorite instrumentals got swapped out for the version with vocals which I can't stand. I can't for the life of me understand why it could be a licensing issue.

It's a multilayered issue:

- licensing could be expired, could change hands, could be removed, could...)

- naming and attribution:

A single song by a single artist will have a gazillion versions (ep, lp, original, re-recorded, re-released, re-mastered, re-re-mastered, best hits, best songs, essential, released for the European market, released for the Japanese market, Christmas special...).

On top of that distributors and rights holders have very shitty metadata that also varies between rights holders.

So if a song changed to a different version, it's quite possible both that the contract for that song changed hands between rights holders and the new rights holder uploaded incorrect/invalid/mangled metadata that Spotify disambiguated in this way.

Or, even simpler: original metadata pointed to the incorrect version, but now points to the correct version. Which is incorrect from your point of view :)

I guess the downvotes come from people who have never dealt with licensing issues or data from content providers. I have :) The above is about 2-5% of the crap content companies (streaming or otherwise) have to deal on daily basis.

Because all of the above doesn't even begin to deal with things like territorial restrictions, content restrictions, territorial content restrictions, territorial content requirements, take down requests from commercial and government entities, rights disputes, content embargoes...

I found your comments helpful. Thanks.

Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)

I'm working on an app to help solve this. It's still waiting for Spotify's approval but I can whitelist some users while in development mode and some beta testing / user feedback would be appreciated. The profile shows my email.

They do yes. But it seems pretty rare. The most recurrent case I've seen, is for remixes of popular song. Probably that labels can signal these.

I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?

Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.

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