Today Spotify has 3,689,519 tracks available in the UK. Five days ago they had 3,696,457 tracks: that’s around 7,000 fewer tracks. What’s going on? Well mostly the reason for this reduction is that Spotify periodically merge duplicate albums which reduces the total number.
However tracks and albums are also frequently removed from Spotify at the behest of record labels. It seems labels often change their minds about what they want to allow on Spotify. Perhaps this is due to the artists involved complaining or some other reason, who knows really. So along with the weekly additions there are weekly removals too. Additions are well-documented on the official Spotify blog, but removals are obviously barely ever mentioned.
Whenever a track gets pulled or locked-out from your region, it turns brown in Spotify:
This is at least better than the track disappearing completely, as it gives you an opportunity to replace the track from another source (e.g. a different greatest hits package or compilation). However when entire albums are pulled this becomes near impossible. I’ve been using Spotify for a few months now and so have created quite a few playlists. Spotify themselves do not publish information about removals, but from my playlists I can see a snapshot of what’s gone AWOL.
Here are my Top 10 albums that used to be on Spotify UK but aren’t any more:
- Mesh – We Collide Tour
- Pete Shelley – Homosapien
- Blur – Best Of
- Fila Brazillia – Retrospective
- Minilogue – Animals
- Covenant – Northern Light
- X-Press 2 – Muzikizum
- Pet Shop Boys – Fundamental (the 2 CD version with the mixes)
- The Rolling Stones – Rolled Gold +
- Sven Vath – The Harlequin, The Robot, and the Ballet Dancer
- The The – Naked Self
- Marc Almond – Open All Night
- The Beautiful South – Miaow
The last three here may not have been available in the UK, so perhaps some of the above are still available in your country. Sometimes albums might re-appear, so it’s always worth re-checking with a Spotify search every once and a while.