What's up aSa. I wanted to share something with you all and please feel free to share your thoughts on this. Take a look at the following screenshot.
As you can see in the screenshot, Spotify didn't tell us which terms of service we violated. In regards to what caused this so call violation, communication with Spotify has been very peculiar and perplexing.
We assumed it was because accepting compensation for playlist placement was against terms. We immediately stopped offering playlist placements for financial compensation. When they continued to take the playlist we learned it wasn't that. We emailed Spotify and this is what they told us.
This didn't make sense because we never lost access to our account and we never downloaded anyone's content from Spotify. I replied to this message and never got a response. This is when we created new playlists. On January 17, Spotify started making playlists private again. After this, we connected with customer service through the website chat. https://support.spotify.com/us/contact-spotify-support/
After several attempts at communicating with Spotify, we discovered the true reason why the playlists were made private. It was because we were using the images of famous artists on our Playlists without a license to do so, thus infringing on copyright/ trademarked material, which is obviously against Spotify's terms.
Since January 18, all playlists cover art of famous artists were removed and replaced with the iFANm logo and Spotify stopped making the playlists private. From what we can see from the artists we manage, our members, and our customers, no streams, no followers, no saves, or accounts were removed. In fact, nothing was removed. The playlists are still there, just not visible to the public.
In Conclusion
Some of you were supportive in giving suggestions and encouragement and we very much appreciate it. We didn't intentionally violate the terms, it was a mistake. We do not want to violate anyone's rights. Some of you were amused and quick to assume bots. To all of you who thought we were using bots, Spotify didn't question our methods nor did they think we were using bots. We ask if our promotion methods are against terms and this is what they said.