Back when we all bought music instead of renting it, serious fans collected thousands vinyl, CDs and tapes, each containing 10 or so songs. Those tens of thousands of tracks became an essential part of our lives. But Spotify thinks those great collections don’t matter any more, placing arbitrary limits on music libraries, even for Premium paid users.
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Spotify caps all music libraries at 10,000 tracks, and a growing number of users are not happy about it.
“The truth is that there are a LOT of music fans that LOVE to have their libraries organized and very complete,” wrote one Spotify user on the streamer’s message board. “The whole idea of paying for a Premium account is not to have this type of limitations.”
Apple Music’s library limit is ten times Spotify’s at 100,000 songs.
Song and album libraries are “what makes Spotify feel like your Spotify – especially if you spent years using iTunes before music entered the streaming era,” wrote Chris Welch of The Verge. “Your Music is everything you’ve plucked from the service’s vault of over 30 million tracks to encompass your personal collection. But that collection has a hard ceiling of 10,000 songs. Why is there such an arbitrary cap?”
To add to the arbitrary nature of the cap, playlists and tracks in playlists do not count toward Spotify’s 10,000 song limit. There also does not appear to be any technical or cost barrier to raising the cap. After all, adding a song or album to your library does not put a copy of it there; but rather just a link back to Spotify’s servers to stream it on demand.
Limits on their accounts is not something that Spotify wants to publicize, of course, and that too has caused consternation. “Not receiving a warning that the maximum number of songs had been reached caused me a lot of trouble,” wrote Spotify customer Steve Lewis. “I kept trying to add the same songs and albums over and over, each time thinking I had succeeded.”
For now, at least, Spotify has no plans to change their song limits, even for paid users. They last issued a statement on the practice back in 2015, which read:
“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%.”