Spotify Web Player should be one of the most loved websites in the world, letting you access the Spotify cosmos of music without even having to download anything to your PC. It’s kind of brilliant, but also terribly flawed, with a lot of people reporting that it’s not working properly or at all on various browsers.
This led us to scribble up a guide that will talk through all the most common reasons why your Spotify Web Player might not be working.
Enable Protected Content
If you try to open Spotify Web Player, but you get a message that “Playback of protected content is not enabled”, then you need to make sure that you enable protected content in your browser.
If you’re using Chrome, go to chrome://settings/content, then scroll down to “Protected content” and enable “Allow site to play protected content”.
If you’re using Firefox, go to the Spotify Web Player site, click the shield icon to the left of the URL bar, then click “Turn off Blocking for this site”.
Clear Cache and Flush DNS
If your Spotify Web Player is launching and seems to work fine except for the fact that it’s not playing music, you should try flushing the DNS cache on your system. This will refresh your PC’s DNS cache, which should make sure that next time you log into Spotify Web Player, its domain name gets properly registered.
To do this in Windows 10, hit Win + R, then enter ipconfig /flushdns
If you’re a Mac or Linux user, don’t worry. We have guides for how to flush your DNS on Mac and how to flush your DNS on Linux too.
Bad News for Safari Users
Bad news for Mac users. If you are or were a Spotify Web Player user on Mac’s native Safari browser, then you can no longer use Spotify Web Player. Spotify has attributed this to various updates that eventually rendered Spotify unusable.
It doesn’t sound like Spotify closed the door indefinitely, as the company said “We can’t say if or when any specific features will be back. But as soon as we’ve got anything to announce, we’ll let everyone know via the Spotify Community.”
We’ll keep this guide updated if anything changes, but for now Safari is a no-go for Spotify Web Player.
Spotify Web Player Won’t Play Songs
If Spotify Web Player is loading and looking like it should work properly but no music is playing, then there are several things that could be causing this.
A potential quick fix is to select an album you want to play on Spotify, click the three-dot icon next to a song in that album, then select “Copy song link.” Paste this link into your browser address bar, hit Enter, and it should jolt Web Player to life, playing the song.
That failing, some users have reported that the issue can be caused by using Spotify across multiple devices. With Spotify Web Player on your browser, grab your phone or tablet and open Spotify on that.
Tap the “Settings cog -> Devices,” then try switching between the different devices displayed, before selecting “Web Player” as the option to listen on. This kind of switch-up can trigger Web Player to work properly again.
In Spotify Web Player click the “Connect” button at the bottom-right and make sure “This Web Player” is selected.
Spotify Web Player Not Working at All
If Spotify Web Player is refusing to load at all, the first thing you should do is clear the cookies in your browser. This varies slightly from browser to browser, but it should be under Settings then Privacy or History. Clear the cookies, restart your browser, and see if it works.
Conclusion
Spotify Web Player may not be perfect, as the above guide shows, but with a few tweaks and a few creases ironed out it does a pretty good job as a stand-in for the fully fledged app. Its redesign earlier in the year has made it resemble the Spotify app much more, too, which is a welcome change.
Have you experienced problems with your Spotify Web Player not working? If you have and have found your own fixes, then do let us and other readers know in the comments.