Before you troubleshoot anything, check what day it is. Discover Weekly refreshes once a week, on Monday, and if you are staring at the same 30 songs on a Wednesday, that is not a bug. That is the playlist doing exactly what it is supposed to do. It sits still for six days and then swaps in a fresh batch. So the single most common reason people think their Discover Weekly is broken is that they are checking it on the wrong day.

If it is Monday (or late Sunday, or even slipping into Tuesday) and the list still has not moved, then yes, something is probably off. The good news is that most of the causes are things you can fix yourself in a couple of minutes. Below is the order I would actually work through them, from the fastest check to the last resort.

For the bigger picture on how this playlist is built and why it behaves the way it does, here is everything about how Discover Weekly works. This page is just the fix-it guide.

First: is it actually Monday yet?

Discover Weekly is not tied to one global clock. It updates overnight into Monday in your local time, but the exact minute drifts, and Spotify does not publish a schedule. Some people get it just after midnight. Others do not see the new list until they have had their morning coffee. A handful report it landing late Sunday night, and every so often it slips to Tuesday.

On the Spotify Community, users regularly post about the timing being all over the place, including one thread where people described the playlist refreshing on a Thursday after already updating that Monday. A moderator there confirmed it can get refreshed mid-week "due to some backend maintenance," which is rare but real.

So the first move is patience. If it is early Monday where you are, close the app, go do something else, and check again in a few hours. For the full breakdown of the timing, including why Sunday and Tuesday updates happen, see when it only refreshes on Monday.

If it is Monday afternoon and nothing has changed, keep going.

If your list feels stuck, it helps to check what Spotify thinks your taste is. Music Profile Viewer shows your top artists, top tracks, and recently played across the last 4 weeks, 6 months, and all time. It uses Spotify's official read-only login and stores nothing. Free, no signup.

Turn off Private Session

This is the fix almost nobody thinks of, and it is the one I would check next.

If you listen with Private Session turned on, that listening does not feed your recommendations. Spotify says this plainly in its own support docs: music you play during a private session "won't affect your recommendations or appear in your Wrapped." It only counts what you play while it is on, and it flips off on its own after about six hours or when you restart the app.

Here is where it bites people. Discover Weekly is built from what you have been listening to. If you accidentally left Private Session on (or you keep it on because you do not want your roommate seeing your guilty-pleasure playlist in Friends Activity), then Spotify has been getting a fraction of your real listening, or none of it. The algorithm has less to work with, so the playlist either goes stale or feels generic.

To check: on mobile, open the app, tap the gear icon or your profile, and look for a Private Session toggle. On desktop, click your profile name in the top right and see if "Private session" has a checkmark next to it. Turn it off. Then listen normally for a few days before the next Monday and see if the refresh improves.

Give it more listening, and more varied listening

The algorithm needs fuel. Discover Weekly leans heavily on collaborative filtering, which means Spotify compares your taste to people who listen like you and surfaces songs they love that you have not heard yet. If you barely used Spotify in the past week, or you played the same three albums on repeat, there is not much for it to compare against.

A few practical things that help:

If your Discover Weekly has been technically updating but the songs are just not landing, that is a different problem from a stuck playlist, and it is worth reading how to get better songs out of it once it does refresh.

Log out and back in

When the day is right and Private Session is off and the list still will not budge, the app itself might be stuck. The old reliable fix is a full log out and log back in.

Do not just close the app. Actually sign out (Settings, then scroll to the bottom and tap Log out), then sign back in with the same account. This forces Spotify to re-sync your library and your generated playlists from the server, which often shakes the new Discover Weekly loose. On the Community threads about this, logging out and in is one of the first things moderators ask people to try, right alongside reinstalling.

Clear the cache or reinstall the app

If a log out did not do it, clear the cache next. A bloated or corrupted cache is a common reason playlists show stale content on one device while looking fine on another.

Still stuck? Delete the app and reinstall it. It is heavier-handed but it wipes any weird local state. Reinstalling is one of the workarounds people report on the long-running Discover Weekly not updating thread, where users have compared notes across iPhone, macOS, the web player, and Android for months.

Update the app

An outdated app can hold onto old data or miss server-side changes. Go to the App Store or Google Play and check whether there is a Spotify update waiting. Install it, restart the app, and look again. This one is easy to skip and easy to fix, so it is worth ruling out before you spend time on anything harder.

Make sure you are on the right account

This sounds obvious, but it catches people constantly. If you have a free account and a Premium account, or a personal login and one you set up through a family or student plan, you may be signed into the wrong one. Your Discover Weekly lives on a specific account. Log into the other one and it might be sitting right there, freshly updated.

Same goes if you share a device with family. Check the email address on the account you are logged into before you assume the playlist is broken.

Be patient with server-side delays

Sometimes it is genuinely on Spotify's end. Discover Weekly is generated for hundreds of millions of listeners, and the rollout is not instant. On the Community, users report seeing different songs at 9:00 AM versus 10:30 AM on the same Monday, which tells you the refresh is still propagating even after it starts.

If you have done everything above and it is still the same list, give it a full day. A delayed refresh that resolves on its own is far more common than an account that is actually broken.

When the playlist has vanished, not just gone stale

There is a difference between Discover Weekly not updating and Discover Weekly disappearing. If you search for it and get "This content is no longer available," or it is nowhere in your library at all, that is a separate issue. Spotify has had documented outages where the playlist went blank or missing for a stretch of users. One such issue was tracked, marked under investigation, and eventually fixed in 2026, though some people kept reporting it for weeks after the "fixed" tag went up.

If that is what you are dealing with, the stale-playlist fixes above will not help. Read the playlist is gone entirely instead, which covers getting a missing Discover Weekly back.

Check what Spotify actually knows about your taste

Here is a step that is less about fixing the app and more about fixing the recommendations. Discover Weekly is only as good as the listening data behind it. If Private Session was on, or you have not been playing much, or your recent listening does not reflect what you actually love, the playlist will feel off no matter how many times you clear the cache.

It helps to see what Spotify thinks your taste is. You can check your real top artists and tracks on Music Profile Viewer, free and with no signup. If your top artists look nothing like the music you have been meaning to listen to, that gap is exactly why Discover Weekly feels stale, and now you know what to feed it.