News May 25, 2018

Limits to your love: Why do Spotify cap the amount of songs in your library?

“Epic collection, friend. There’s no more room in Your Library. To save more, you’ll need to remove some songs or albums.”

You’ve possibly never seen this message pop up on Spotify. It might be that your collection of saved songs isn’t quite of epic proportions, despite containing ‘Epic’ by Faith No More and more than a few Epic Records releases.

Regardless, this message is what pops up if you attempt to save a ten-thousand-and-first song to your Spotify library.

While anyone who recalls scrimping and saving for $31 CDs may balk at those who complain about only being able to save ten thousand songs in your Spotify library, it seems redundant to limit what is essentially a bookmarking and organisational tool, which requires next to no memory, space, or data usage, on a service which its users pay for.

Adding to the stupidity is the fact that when you save an album — let’s say The Stone Roses (although you really should own this on multiple formats) — it counts the eleven songs on the record, plus one extra one for the album itself. If that was confusing (sorry), basically an eleven track albums counts as twelve tracks – for no apparent or logical reason.

Want more arbitrary limits? You can easily bypass this library limit by starting playlists instead, which allow 9,999 songs per playlist. Theoretically this would allow you to save infinite songs (well, the 30 million tracks the service currently boasts) but I’m guessing if you’ve hit this 10K limit, you won’t really relish reorganising these songs into separate playlists.

Plus, if you’re saving tens of thousands of songs, you’ll be unlikely to recall which songs sit in which list, unless you are Rain Man.

Obviously, numerous users have complained about this service over the years.

Last September, the company responded to a complaint about this, basically saying “rack off, nerds” but in a friendlier way.

“At the moment we don’t have plans to extend the Your Music limit. The reason is because less than 1% of users reach it. The current limit ensures a great experience for 99% of users instead of an “OK” experience for 100%”

This is confusing. They are suggesting a user lag if people’s personal ‘saved’ libraries begin swelling to obscene amount, despite admitting only 1% of users have saved at least 10,000 songs. It’s a logical non-starter, as far as I can tell.

“We’ve kept a close eye on your feedback though”, the reply cheerily continues, “and we agree if a solution for this could be met it would be beneficial for everyone.”

They go on to say these plans aren’t “in our current timeline”.

In comparison Apple Music caps its library at 100,000 songs, which seems like an arbitrary number they don’t expect users to actually hit; possibly (and speculatively) a coding necessity in which an upper value needs to be added (soooo speculatively). Either way, it hasn’t slowed the experience for users.

Spotify, here’s the solution. People are paying you money, people want to save songs – how about making this feature unlimited? Or at least cap it at thirty million. Let’s not get too crazy.

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