UPDATE 26 May 2026:
Spotify pushed a fix on 20-21 May and most users across Rekordbox, Serato and djay are now seeing their playlists again. The recovery has not been clean, though – Spotify’s own Community page still lists the issue as “under investigation” rather than “fixed”, a handful of users are reporting the symptoms have returned, and Spotify has not publicly explained the nine-day failure. The episode has shaken confidence in the integration, with a number of DJs in the support threads saying they had already cancelled Spotify or moved their playlists over to Apple Music or Tidal before the fix arrived.
Spotify’s third-party DJ software integration has been broken for nearly a week, with users of Rekordbox, Serato DJ Pro, Serato DJ Lite and Algoriddim djay all reporting that their Spotify playlists show up as empty inside their DJ apps. The fault first surfaced on 12 May and at the time of writing it is still listed as an ongoing issue under investigation on Spotify’s community forum.
The symptom is consistent across all three pieces of software. Playlist names load into the Spotify panel as normal, but the tracks inside them don’t appear – users see a “No Songs” message or just empty rows. Spotify itself works fine outside DJ software, and other streaming integrations in the same apps (Apple Music, Beatport, SoundCloud, Tidal) are unaffected. The fault persists across operating systems, software versions and network connections, which rules out anything DJs can fix at their end. Threads are filling up on the Algoriddim, Pioneer DJ and DJs subreddit forums.
What the software makers are saying
One of the affected software makers told us the problem started surfacing on 13 May and “appears to affect a subset of users in the US”, adding that they have escalated it and are “working closely with Spotify to resolve what currently appears to be a temporary regional issue”. Spotify itself hasn’t yet scoped the problem to a region in its official status post.
The user-side evidence does skew American so far, but country information is missing from many forum posts, and Spotify has not given any ETA for a fix. Whether non-US DJs are quietly affected or simply haven’t piled into the threads yet is not clear.
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A workaround, and the bigger point
For DJs with a gig this weekend, the patch-up options aren’t pretty. Some users report that a VPN set to a country outside the US restores access. Others have moved to Apple Music for the time being, using TuneMyMusic or Apple’s built-in import to bulk-shift their playlists across.
But the real workaround is the one we’ve been making for years at DDJT: streaming services aren’t your music library. This is the second Spotify-Rekordbox wobble in two months (March’s 7.2.11 track loading mess was the first), and the integration itself is only seven months old. If a playlist matters to you for a gig, own the files. Treat Spotify and the rest as a discovery tool that feeds into a local, owned library, not as the library itself. The convenience is real, but so is the fragility.
Phil Morse
