Missing songs in Spotify playlists and how to restore them

2023-02-28

Did you know Spotify removes songs from your playlists? When music licenses expire, the songs are silently hidden from your playlists. You can see them as grayed out if you enable the “Hide Unplayable Songs” toggle under Playback settings:

Use cases for AI/ML

Often enough though, the songs do exist on Spotify, but with new song ID’s. It’s a bit of a mess to replace them, but it can be done.

I haven’t found a way to export your playlist song titles/artists easily, so:

  1. Take screenshot(s) of your playlist.
  2. Use an OCR tool (e.g. Convertio) to convert it into a text file.
  3. Edit the text file into a CSV file with two columns: TITLE,ARTIST.
  4. Use Nick Wander’s excellent CSV import tool for Spotify (direct link to tool) to import the tracks into Spotify as a new playlist.
  5. Drag-drop the imported tracks into your old playlist that you’re restoring.