Spotify now frustratingly defaults to autoplay for connected devices
Spotify quietly updated its autoplay feature with a seriously frustrating quirk. When you play music on your Spotify Connect devices, autoplay is now enabled by default and there’s no way to turn it off. This means that after your album, playlist, or your song selection is done playing on any device other than your phone or computer, Spotify will continue playing recommended tracks indefinitely.
Users have voiced their complaints in the Spotify Community forum for weeks, filling an ongoing thread with their grievances. It caught the attention of a Spotify Community moderator, who provided some more information about the issue — which is apparently a feature and definitely not a bug.
“We can confirm that Autoplay is the default setting for any connected device,” a Spotify spokesperson said in an emailed statement to The Verge. “This means that whenever you play music from Spotify on a device other than your phone or computer, Autoplay will be enabled, and tracks will be added to continue your listening experience.”
However, the spokesperson says that “Autoplay will not commence if you play a track, album, or playlists with Repeat enabled.” That obviously doesn’t help if you want an album or playlist to end after it’s done playing. The spokesperson also mentioned that Spotify updated the experience “during the last couple of weeks.”
In the aforementioned thread, the Spotify moderator suggested that users cast their votes in a post in the Spotify Idea Exchange to show support for an option to toggle autoplay on and off, but the page that the moderator links to doesn’t address that exact issue. In the post’s description, the user asks for Spotify to bring back the settings menu on the Spotify web player that was recently removed, which prevents users from changing their autoplay options when listening from the web player.
Other than the title of the post: “[AutoPlay] Option to toggle Autoplay on/off across all devices/platforms,” it doesn’t have much to do with the problem users were initially discussing, causing confusion in that entire thread — comments on the post concern both the settings menu and the problem with Spotify Connect. It’s unclear whether bringing back the settings menu on the web player will help resolve the autoplay issue on connected devices (or vice versa).
When a post on the Spotify Idea Exchange receives over 180 votes in under six months, the suggestion gets the “Live Idea” label and will be looked at by the Spotify team. Right now, this so-called idea is currently a “Good Suggestion,” meaning it received more than 50 votes in under three months. The status should be upgraded soon, though, since it has a total of 259 votes at this time of writing.
It’s ironic that Spotify calls something that’s essentially a bug report an “idea.” After all, music on connected devices wasn’t set on an infinite loop too long ago. With Spotify projected to increase its user base from 381 million to 400 million users by the end of this year, it’s going to have a lot more users it needs to satisfy.
“At Spotify, we’re committed to delivering the best possible listening experience. We recently updated our Autoplay settings for connected devices, and are actively gathering feedback from the Spotify Community,” the Spotify spokesperson continued. “As always, we’ll continue to evolve this feature over time based on user feedback.”
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