I came across this limit recently and at first thought it was a bug. I had saved a bunch of albums that I didn’t want to listen to right away but also didn’t want to forget about. Some time later on I had (predictably) forgotten about them. So I opened Spotify to refresh my memory and possibly even listen to one of the albums I had saved to my (Premium) Spotify collection for later listening because I pay for the service that supposedly lets me do that. Except they weren’t there.

Maybe I had saved them incorrectly (I thought), although I don’t know how I would have done that since saving an album in Spotify is a pretty straightforward process (a single action performed in a single click). Not much room for error. Then I thought maybe I saved them on my work computer and it somehow hadn’t synced my account so they weren’t appearing at home.

I tried saving a few more albums and sure enough, they showed up in my collection as expected. I’m not sure why or at what point I thought to do this but I closed the app and reopened it and the albums I had just saved were gone.  I thought it had to be a bug since there was nothing in the app letting me know what happened. And as long as the app was open I could keep adding as many albums as I wanted with no indication that I had hit a limit.

After some Googling, I found that I wasn’t only one having this issue. And not only that, but that Spotify was aware of the issue and didn’t seem to think it was an issue.

This was posted over a year ago on the Spotify “Live Ideas” forum, where people can suggest and vote on new features:

The main issue here is with the way the Spotify app is counting things. Every album you “save” to Your Music counts as multiple items against the 10,000 item limit – an item for each song and then another item for the album itself (so 11 for a 10 song album, etc). Counting that way, most people with even a moderately extensive collection are going to hit the limit pretty fast.

So why even have a limit? The only thing I can come up with is that one of the views in the app (Your Music -> Songs) loads everything you have saved in a single list. There are probably some performance issues when that list gets to be larger than 10,000 items. But that seems like a relatively easy problem to fix.

…the only real explanation is that they just don’t give a shit.

So maybe there’s another reason. I don’t know what it would be though, since all that’s being saved is a reference to each song (probably an id). It can’t be an issue of storage space, so it must have something to do with the app having to process the entire list at once. And that’s a pretty common problem that’s been solved a hundred different ways since people started using computers to process and display data, so the only real explanation is that they just don’t give a shit.

As of today there are 22 pages of comments and 786 “kudos” on this “idea” and the last we have heard from Spotify is that they are marking it as “Not right now”. And by “Not right now” they seem to be saying “Not for at least a year, and maybe never” since that update was posted 10 months ago.

It will be interesting to see what happens after Apple Music launches. I know I’ll be checking it out.