Spotify and logins

I have been a very happy Spotify Premium subscriber since 2010. While I don’t necessarily like or agree with certain decisions and stances the company took in the past, from a mere customer experience standpoint, I have had nothing to complain about. Last year I took advantage of a coupon I got at a local electronics store and tried Apple Music free for three months. But I only lasted four weeks before cancelling and keep using Spotify. While I think Spotify’s app UI could be improved, the music selection, the seamless experience of streaming what I’m listening to any other connected device, and especially the fact that Spotify doesn’t mess with my iTunes libraries, all this makes Spotify the superior choice for me.

The only, truly irritating thing with Spotify has happened to me three times in the past few months.

So, when you log into your Spotify account from a new device or a modern-enough device you’ve just installed the Spotify app on, the login is usually successful, but Spotify sends you an email message that looks like this:

This kind of practice is rather common today. Steam, Dropbox, Box, other cloud services and other companies do this — and it’s good. It’s a good approach to security. You’re told that a new login happened, and if it was you, all is fine, proceed as usual. If it wasn’t you, here’s a link to secure your account.

But back in October I was checking a few things on my fourth-generation iPod touch running iOS 6, and since I wanted to take some screenshots of Spotify’s older interface, I opened the app and (predictably, I’ll admit) I couldn’t log in or load anything. Apparently, Spotify took this as some kind of ‘suspicious activity’ and unilaterally decided to reset my account password and force me to create a new one.

I hate changing passwords for no reason. Especially when I have Spotify installed on several different devices and I have to update the login credentials on all of them. What I just don’t understand is, why not send me the same kind of email reserved for logins on ‘new’ devices, as seen above? Or send a similar message but with a slightly different wording, like: We noticed you tried to log in from an unsupported app or device. If it was you… etc.

Of course, having no other choice, I begrudgingly changed the password. Only to have the same exact thing happen again earlier this month. I was using my 2008 black MacBook running Snow Leopard, and in late 2023 or early 2024 I managed to download and install a version of the Spotify app that could be used on Macs running Snow Leopard and Lion, and I remembered using it successfully as recently as maybe March or April 2024. So I launched it, and everything seemed normal; it of course prompted me for my account credentials because I had changed the password in October. But after entering my credentials, I got a login error and — you guessed it — an email message telling me my password had been reset due to ‘suspicious activities’ and I had to change it. Again.

One thing I’ve always praised Spotify for is their fairly extended app support, giving me the ability of listening to music even from older Macs and iOS devices. For example, I just logged in from my 2017 iMac running High Sierra and the operation was successful. When opening the app, I did get a warning that “my operating system is out of date”, but the app technically still works. But at this point, it’s a guessing game. One day I might open the app on this Mac again, or on my old iPhone 5s running iOS 12, and the app might not work, and I will have to change my password yet again, against my will, just because Spotify considers this ‘suspicious activity’.

There’s nothing else to do here except venting my frustration, I know. But I wish these kinds of processes failed more elegantly.