AniPlaylist’s Spotify account is currently suspended

Since January 20th, AniPlaylist's Spotify account has been suspended by Spotify. The profile is still visible, and you can still follow playlists, however I am currently unable to update any playlist on the account.

AniPlaylist is not the only Spotify playlist curator in this situation, other people & groups curating playlists for different music genres have been experiencing the same issues recently. What I'm going to detail below is only focused on what I have been experiencing as an anime music playlist curator.

Playlist reports

As I said above, AniPlaylist's Spotify account is currently suspended, but it all started a few days before, on January 14th, when I received a lot of playlist reports.

When someone reports a playlist, the playlist title, description and cover are immediately removed, making the playlist invisible in Spotify's search engine. 

I have been used to those reports since I started creating playlists. I always took those reports very seriously, there's always a possibility that someday a right holder might ask me to stop using an anime illustration I have been using as a playlist cover for example, and I would go by that decision without any hesitation. 

This is why I decided to always answer the report notifications I got from Spotify in order to make an appeal and get additional information on why my playlists are being reported.
At first, Spotify was answering back, and when they did, they always told me that those reports were invalid, meaning that someone simply abused Spotify's report feature. But lately they stopped answering. 

Abuse of Spotify's report process & suspension

Last September, reports started to become more frequent, I even got more than 300 in the span of a week. From my developer experience, I am pretty convinced those are triggered by someone using a script to abuse Spotify's playlist report system. 

I tried to contact Spotify countless times in September, but they never took the matter into consideration.

So I decided to fight back myself and put the playlist's content back each time a strike happened, which made them stop at some point. 

But this situation has been happening again since January 14th on a very specific panel of playlists, and that is important to note. Of course, I tried to tell Spotify's Support about it, but there's apparently nothing they can do.

Since Spotify wasn't doing anything, I continued putting back the playlist content as always. But those behind all of this didn't like that too much and decided to go to the next level.

They apparently found a way to report the whole AniPlaylist account, which ended up in the current situation in which I can't even log into the account.

I tried to make an appeal to this decision, but Spotify never answered. I have been contacting their support every day since, but they can't do anything but forward the request to a team in charge of those matters. But this team never got back to me at the moment I am writing this.

Who is behind this situation?

 In the meantime, I tried to find who could have been behind this. Of course, I first thought it could be an action led by a record label or any other anime related right-holder, but there was no obvious common point between all playlists that were targeted. 

Then, I also noticed that all other popular playlists based on those anime had also been reported and had their titles, descriptions & covers removed. 

From there it was pretty easy to find the "culprit", there's only one Spotify user which has been benefiting from all these popular playlists being removed from Spotify. That user has started creating anime playlists a few days ago, all based on the same anime that were featured in the panel of removed playlists.

I decided not to disclose this account's username, as I don't see any point in doing so.

As I mentioned above, AniPlaylist is not the only curator targeted by such actions, the user I identified is probably not the same that is acting against other playlist curators outside the anime scope, but they probably share the same methods of abusing Spotify's report system.

What's next?

At the moment, we can only wait for Spotify to take any action. Of course, I would like to retrieve access to the AniPlaylist account, but Spotify first needs to fix their report process flaws.

I will continue to contact their support regularly because I don't want this to be ignored, even if it means having to wait weeks for their teams to answer. 

Hopefully this suspension has no impact on the rest of our activities, you can still check all anime songs & albums we have on our website aniplaylist.com, our Twitter account & subreddit will remain active and share with you all new releases as always.

You can also continue to generate your personalized playlists from your AniList or MyAnimeList account by using MyAniPlaylist.

Feel free to share this post, I hope Spotify will finally start to take action against those who abuse their report process.

If you want to give us some help, feel free to give an up vote to the following idea on Spotify's forum: Solution to false/abusive reporting. The solution proposed might not be the best to avoid further abuse, but at least it can show them that there's an ongoing issue with their report process that must be fixed. 

Thank you all for your continued support.