“Problematic” was one of a plethora of tracks quietly purged from the service on January 1st, 2021.

But Young says she has never paid for third-party streaming boosts. when a paid marketing service, manager, or agency uses bots to artificially boost play numbers and increase an artist’s revenue, which is a practice banned under Spotify’s terms of service. He explained Spotify often performs a sweep of songs they suspect have fake streaming activity - a.k.a. “ didn’t give me a warning or reach out to me to ask about the issue,” she says. Her distributor DistroKid emailed later that day to confirm the track was removed, with no explanation as to why. Young reached out to the streaming service, but to no avail. But that’s what happened in the late hours of January 2nd when a fan frantically messaged the Los Angeles-based pop singer to ask why her song “Problematic” had vanished from Spotify the day before. The company has been in the headlines recently because of a backlash over its exclusive $200 million-plus deal to distribute Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, which has included COVID misinformation and instances of Rogan using the N-word (episodes that Spotify has since removed).Furiously writing emails wasn’t how Callie Young wanted to start her 2021.

As of the end of 2021, the company reported 406 million total monthly active users (which includes 180 million paying subscribers).

Spotify is the industry’s biggest music and audio streaming service. Spotify acknowledged that many customers were “having problems logging in and reaching customer support.”Ĭlick here to subscribe to Variety’s free Strictly Business newsletter covering media earnings, financial and investment news and more.Īlso Tuesday, Discord, the chat, voice and video-communications service, reported an issue that caused message failures for several hours. A little more than an hour later, the company indicated that the technical problems had been resolved, with Spotify Status tweeting, “Everything’s looking much better now! Give a shout if you still need help.” Thanks for your reports!” the Spotify Status account on Twitter posted at 1:22 p.m. “Something’s not quite right, and we’re looking into it.

Spotify down.