Have you ever been abroad maybe as an exchange student or a business person traveling for more than 14 days? Then you know how much Spotify hates you. You are listening to your playlists and then Spotify logs you out of your device. You can’t sing in. You don’t even know why. And then you remember, you need to update your country or Spotify won’t let you sing in ever.
I’ve had this problem with Spotify more than once and it’s time someone sends them some feedback about how we as users want to deal with this annoying issue.
Pains
First off, why does Spotify sign you out? I spent like two days trying to log back in and it wouldn’t let me. I even changed my password. I got no warning that this was going to happen. A friend asked me on which country was my Spotify account (Mexico), I had been in Singapore for more than two weeks now, so of course, Spotify curses all travelers and logs them out. No explanation. Just a vague error message.
To fix this you have to log into the browser. (FYI there is no link from the app to edit your settings, go check) Then go to ‘Edit Profile’ and then change the country. After this, you will be able to log back in on your phone or tablet.
Then when I returned to Mexico I was ready to change my country in advance. There shouldn’t be any problems now, right? Oh boy… they do have ways to surprise me. I couldn’t change my country. Mexico or any other country wasn’t on the list.
Apparently, Spotify hadn’t detected that I relocated. So the option wasn’t showing. I had a chat with customer support. Which weren’t very helpful. In the end, they didn’t resolve my problem. I figured it out by myself.
If you changed countries and Spotify hasn’t detected it, on the browser check for the country code. For example, this was showing on my browser: https://www.spotify.com/sg-en/account/profile/ so I just changed it to https://www.spotify.com/mx/account/profile/ and voilà, it showed Mexico as an option and I was able to change it!
Suggestion
I didn’t have the time to create a whole research process for this suggestion. It’s an alert pop-up on the mobile app, which is where I was having my log in problems in the first place. Spotify does have a way of knowing if you switched countries, so why not just ask the user?
There you have it, nothing too complicated. This way the user experience won’t be disrupted after 14 days abroad. I know that it is simpler said than done. But I wanted to open the discussion around this Spotify blocker I found. Has this happened to you? Let me know you can find me on Twitter or Instagram.
Melissa Gutiérrez 