If you are an avid Spotify user, I’m sure you know that the platform allows users to create public and collaborative playlists that other users can access and contribute songs to. Banking on this feature, multiple Spotify bots have been sabotaging users’ playlists by adding unwanted songs and changing the title of the playlists. While the bot that’s being a menace is named “Ashley”, there are two other similar bots named “Elsie” and “Emma” that are also doing the same and annoying the heck out of Spotify users.
Spotify Bots Sabotaging User Playlists
The bot was recently spotted by popular TikToker and lo-fi music composer JW Francis while he was reacting to Spotify playlists that feature his songs. Francis shared a TikTok video a week ago in which he is going through all the playlists that feature his songs. In the video, he came across a playlist named “ASHLEY ???? do not add things to my playlist ???!!!”
Following this video, many of his fans commented on it, mentioning that their playlists have also been sabotaged by “Ashley.” Taking a look at the comments, Francis shared another video the following day in which he went through numerous playlists that are being ruined by the Ashley bot on Spotify. You can check out some of the playlist titles being used by playlist creators to keep the Ashley bot out of their playlists in the image below.
Now, following the playlist-ruining run, netizens have theorized a few explanations as to who or what Ashley actually is. Francis says that Ashley is one of the many bots that are created by solo artists and musicians to promote their accounts and increase their listening stats on Spotify. He further discovered that Ashley (or Emma) was exclusively adding songs of one particular Spotify user named Pesukone to playlists. And well, Anmol from our team also had his collaborative playlists sabotaged by this bot and Pesukone music being promoted in this manner. Check out the screenshots right here:
Going to Pesukone’s Instagram profile, it was discovered that it is a Finland-based collective that highlights unknown artists and musicians in the world. However, there was no evidence that connected Pesukone to Ashley.
Users have also taken their concerns to Reddit, hoping to find solutions for the increasing number of bots on Spotify that acquire links to public playlists and add unwanted songs to them. However, apart from manually removing the added songs and the bot user, identifying the bot, and blocking it on Spotify, there is no other solution to this issue as of now. We hope Spotify understands our concerns and rolls out a fix to this infuriating playlist hijacking issue right away.
