Have you listened to a Spotify playlist recently and found that some of the songs are greyed out and don’t play? That’s because the track has been removed. Artists (or more usually their record labels) sometimes decide to pull their content from Spotify and other streaming services. This might be unintentional (for example, because a publishing deal expires), but more often than not it’s due to the band’s label deciding to pull the plug. Whether this leads to increased CD sales or increased illegal downloads and bad-will towards the band is up to you to decide. I’ve built up a lot of Spotify playlists over the past year or so: finding holes appear in them is disheartening as I’m always keen to ensure my playlists work as a whole. I try to treat each one as an album in its own right and order songs so that the playlist flows.
You can check the Pansentient League’s Spotify Removals page for an on-going list, but here are some of bands I’ve used in playlists over the past year whose tracks have now gone AWOL.
NOTE: This “list is ridiculously out-dated.” (June 2015)