Why Did Spotify Remove “Weatherman”? Hank Williams Jr. Song

One of the promises of Spotify, and music streaming services more generally, is that they give you access to all the music you’d ever want to hear. Their catalogs are vast and include huge amounts of popular music that span decades.

Sometimes, though, users battle the limitations of this format. That can be especially difficult when users discover that the music they used to stream on the platform is no longer available. Some country fans recently ran into this problem when they discovered that “Weatherman” and other songs from Hank Williams Jr.’s 1981 album “The Pressure Is On” have been removed from Spotify. Here’s what we know about why that happened.

Unfortunately, Spotify has yet to offer anything resembling an explanation for why “The Pressure Is On” is no longer available. Users attest to the fact that the music was available until just recently. Since it’s no longer on the service, some of the songs that were only on that album have been pulled from the service altogether. If you want to listen to “Weatherman” on Spotify, you’re simply out of luck.

The likeliest explanation for the album’s disappearance is some sort of rights dispute. Typically, though, when these kinds of disputes occur, a musician’s entire catalogue is pulled. Sometimes, though, Spotify’s deal with a specific record label changes, and as a result, songs that used to be available on a streaming service no longer are, and users are simply out of luck.

Needless to say, Hank Williams Jr. fans were less than thrilled about this change in the availability of the songs.

“This rarely has anything to do with Spotify, and almost always with record company ownership bulls–t. Things come and go quite frequently for some artists,” one person wrote on Reddit.

“I have yet to hear a legitimate reason why the album was removed,” another person added.

Ultimately in the streaming era, much of what’s available comes down to contracts between various companies over the rights. Spotify tries to get access to as many songs and artists as possible, but if companies want to pull their songs off of a service, or the artists behind those songs want to exercise that right, they often can.

That’s why, even today, some people advocate for investing in some sort of physical media. That way, you have a copy of the music that you love that can’t be ripped away at a moment’s notice. This is both more expensive and less convenient, but it gives the owner total control over when they’ll be allowed to hear a certain song.

Spotify gives us access to thousands of songs at the tip of our fingers. What we can forget, though, are all the songs we don’t have access to, even if it feels like we have access to virtually everything that’s available.