How to Remove a Follower on Spotify

Spotify doesn't give you a simple "remove this follower" button like Instagram does — which is why so many people go looking for a workaround. Here's the honest picture of what you can and can't do, and the steps that actually remove someone from your followers.

Quick answer: There's no one-tap remove-follower option on Spotify. The only reliable way to make a specific person stop following you is to block their account, which removes the follow in both directions. Alternatively, make your account and playlists private so there's nothing public left to follow. This is one piece of managing your followers — the full picture lives in our complete guide.

Can you remove a follower on Spotify?

Not directly. Spotify's design treats follows as low-stakes, so the app has never added a per-follower "remove" control for personal accounts. Your options are indirect: block the account, or reduce what's public.

It helps to understand why Spotify works differently from Instagram or X. On those platforms, following is the core social action — your feed, reach, and content ranking all depend on it, so they give you granular tools to remove or restrict individual followers. Spotify is a music service first. A "follow" there mostly means one thing: that account gets a nudge when you publish or update a public playlist, and your public playlists surface for them a little more easily. There's no feed to protect and no engagement metric riding on the relationship, so Spotify never built the per-follower controls people expect from a social network. That's not a bug or a hidden setting you're missing — the button genuinely doesn't exist, which is why the workarounds below are the real answer.

It's also worth separating two things people often conflate. Someone following your account is different from someone viewing your profile. Spotify has no profile-view feature at all, so there's no list of "who looked at me" to clean up — only the followers list, which is the thing these steps actually affect.

Option 1: Block the account (removes the follow)

Blocking is the closest thing to removing a follower, and for targeting one specific person it's the only method that genuinely works. Here's how to do it:

1. Open the person's profile in Spotify. If you don't know their exact handle, tap your own follower count to open your followers list and tap their name from there; otherwise use the search bar and switch to the Profiles results tab.
2. Tap the three dots (⋯) menu near the top of their profile. On desktop this is the same menu, shown next to their name.
3. Choose Block. Spotify may ask you to confirm; accept and the block takes effect immediately.

The steps are effectively identical on iPhone, Android, and the desktop app — the block lives on your account, not your device, so it applies everywhere you're signed in. If you don't see the option, updating the app to the latest version usually restores it.

Here's exactly what blocking does. It removes the follow relationship in both directions, so the person is no longer counted among your followers, and if you happened to follow them back that connection is dropped too. It hides your profile and activity from them, and it prevents them from re-following you or seeing and adding your public playlists while the block is in place. What blocking does not do is send an explicit "you have been blocked" alert — Spotify stays quiet about it. The person isn't formally told, though an attentive user may work it out when your profile stops appearing for them. And the effect isn't necessarily permanent: if you later unblock the account, you simply restore their ability to follow you again. Unblocking does not silently re-add the old follow — if they want back in, they have to choose to follow you a second time.

Option 2: Make your profile and playlists private

If you'd rather not single anyone out — or if several accounts you don't recognize are following you and blocking them one by one feels like too much — you can shrink your public footprint instead. Blocking targets a person; going private changes what everyone can see and follow:

• Set playlists to private: open a playlist → three dots → Make private. A private playlist drops off your public profile and no longer shows a follow button, so no one new can pick it up.
• Turn off "add to profile": when you create or edit a playlist you can choose not to display it on your profile even if it isn't fully private, which keeps casual visitors from browsing straight into your library.
• Private Session: switch this on to stop broadcasting what you're currently playing. It's worth being clear about its limits — a Private Session only hides your live listening activity, and it turns itself off after a period of inactivity (Spotify cites roughly six hours). It does nothing to your follower list; it's a privacy toggle for the "now playing" feed, not a follower tool.
• Review your public playlists: in Settings, look over which playlists are still public and prune anything you'd rather not have discoverable.

Be realistic about what this achieves. Going private won't delete the followers you already have — those accounts stay attached to your profile — but it steadily shrinks what anyone can see or newly follow, which is often enough if your real goal is privacy rather than removing one particular person. If you simply want to look at other people's profiles without following or being noticed, you can also browse privately instead.

What about playlist followers?

Playlist followers work the same frustrating way: there's no control to remove a specific person who follows one of your public playlists. You can't open the playlist's follower list and evict someone, because Spotify doesn't expose that action.

The only real lever is again privacy. If you flip the playlist to private, it stops being publicly followable — anyone who had it saved as a followed playlist loses it from their library, and no one new can add it. If you still want specific friends to have the playlist, the cleaner route is to make it private (or a personal collaborative list) and then share the link directly with just the people you choose, rather than leaving it open for anyone to follow. It's a blunt instrument, but for playlists it's the only one Spotify gives you.

See who follows you first

Before you block anyone or start flipping things to private, it's worth taking stock of who actually follows you — you may find the "stranger" is a friend's second account, or that the list is shorter than you feared. To check your followers, tap your follower count at the top of your profile to open the full list, then tap through to any account whose name you don't recognize. Knowing exactly who's there makes it much easier to decide whether a single block will solve the problem or whether going private is the better call.

Want your followers, following, and public playlists on one clean screen instead of tapping through Spotify's small profile view? Open Music Profile Viewer — a free Spotify profile viewer that uses Spotify's official read-only login and stores nothing.