My Playlists Are Mixtapes, and Spotify Keeps Erasing Songs Off Them
On September 29 I tried to search for a song on my phone and Spotify couldn’t do it. It turned out to be a big outage, tens of thousands of people across several countries, not just me. It came back. Outages come back. But it made me sit down and deal with something that has bugged me for years.
Spotify has raised its US price three times since 2023, from $9.99 to $12.99 a month (MusicTech). I’m still paying it, and I’m not writing this to announce that I’m leaving. What has kept me there all this time isn’t the catalogue or the recommendations. It’s the playlists. That’s also what makes me nervous.
A playlist is a mixtape
To me, playlists are mixtapes. They carry a lot of weight. Each one is a record of what I was going through when I made it.
Some of mine aren’t even good. The earliest running playlists are honestly pretty bad. That isn’t the point.
Songs with “run” in the title
When I first got sober, I was miserable. I hadn’t really enjoyed music in years. I was trying to do a couch to 5K, and I’ll be frank: I was trying not to fucking kill myself, which was a real risk in those days.
All the energy I could muster went into searching for songs that had the word run in them. That was the whole curation strategy. Not tempo, not genre, not taste. If it said “run,” it went on the list, and I put it in my ears and went outside.
My main running playlist today has 5,042 songs on it. About 100 of them have “run” somewhere in the title.
I still go back and listen to those old lists sometimes. Not because they’re good, but because they remind me how far I’ve come. It’s hard to explain how much a bad playlist can mean until you have one like that.
The quiet greying-out
Streaming services lose the rights to songs all the time. The song doesn’t vanish from your playlist with an announcement. It just goes grey, and your mixtape has a gap where a song used to be. Sometimes it disappears entirely, and unless you remember what was there, you’ll never know.
That same day I wrote a script that saves a copy of every playlist I own. On the first run it found 365 songs already greyed out across my library, 160 of them on that big running playlist. That’s 365 small holes.
None of this is news to me. These playlists have already outlived at least one service. I’ve tried others over the years, Amazon Music among them, and the playlists came with me. Every one of those moves was extremely painful: sitting in front of a screen, searching for songs one at a time in an app, and adding them back by hand. Even then I could see songs falling through the cracks. I knew the loss was happening. I just never took the time to write the code to do something about it. Until now.
I want to be fair here, because I think it matters. Licensing is complicated. Plenty of artists make far less from streaming than they would have from selling CDs or tapes. When an artist or a label pulls their catalogue to negotiate a better deal somewhere else, that’s them trying to get what they deserve, and I’m not going to be angry at them for it. I accept that this is going to happen.
But accepting that a song can leave a service is different from accepting that it leaves my playlist, with no record of it ever being there. I put years into these. They’re digital artifacts I think of fondly. They mean something to me, and I want to be able to keep the originals.
What I’m doing about it
Nothing drastic. I’m still paying. Here’s the plan:
- I asked Spotify for a copy of my data. Account → Privacy → Download your data. I ticked the extended streaming history too, which covers every play since the account was opened. They say it takes up to 30 days.
- A weekly snapshot. A small script saves every playlist I own as a spreadsheet each Sunday, compares it with the week before, and emails me when songs go grey or drop off. Each song is saved with its standard ID code (ISRC), so another service could match it exactly. Even when Spotify loses a song, I still have the record of what was there.
- A tripwire. The same script emails me if Spotify ever stops letting me export my own playlists. That’s the one change that would move me from “annoyed” to “leaving.”
If the prices get crazy, or that tripwire goes off, I’m open to other options: another service, or self-hosting my own library. Playlists have always been what kept me locked in. With a copy of them in hand, they don’t have to be.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece, including source verification, was provided by Claude (Anthropic). The price history is cited to the source linked inline; the opinions are my own.