It’s a pretty good New Music Friday, everybody. But today, while adding some new releases to my Spotify library, I ran into one of the app’s most aggravating restrictions: I crossed the 10,000-song limit. The “Your Music” section of Spotify is where all of your saved artists, albums, and songs go. It’s what makes Spotify feel like your Spotify — especially if you spent years using iTunes before music entered the streaming era. 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?
Playlists don’t work this way. Spotify treats playlists differently from your library. They’re technically part of it, but they existed before Your Music was introduced and don’t count toward any singular library limit; each of your Spotify playlists can have up to 10,000 songs. I love Discover Weekly and Release Radar, and I build out plenty of my own playlists with the best songs from a given month or year. But I can’t get by on playlists alone. Something about it feels barbarous. Maybe I’m just old.
Either way, Spotify has never offered up a great explanation for why the limit on Your Music is there to begin with. In response to thousands of votes from users asking for a higher limit, the company responded with this:
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%.