Playback fails with FaultyRequest(INVALID_CREDENTIALS) at login5 — persists after full re-authorization

Help and support
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Spotify playback in Mopidy stopped working between Sunday and Monday this week (Aug 9–10, 2026), with no changes on my end. Browsing, search, and playlists all still work fine — only playback fails, and the account plays normally in the official Spotify app the whole time.

Setup

  • Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi OS (aarch64)
  • Mopidy 3.4.2
  • mopidy-spotify (latest, via pip)
  • gst-plugin-spotify 0.15.0-alpha.1-3aab047 (librespot 0.8.0), from the kingosticks/gst-plugins-rs-build releases
  • Spotify Premium account, ~6 months old setup, previously working without issue

Symptom

Web API login succeeds and playlists load normally. On play, the log shows the AP-level handshake succeeding, but the subsequent login5 request is rejected:

INFO   librespot session: Authenticated as '<user>' !
DEBUG  librespot spclient: Received a granted token
DEBUG  librespot http_client: Requesting https://login5.spotify.com/v3/login
ERROR  librespot player: Unable to load audio item: Error { kind: FailedPrecondition, error: FaultyRequest(INVALID_CREDENTIALS) }
ERROR  mopidy.audio.gst GStreamer error: Resource not found.

Troubleshooting already done

  • Confirmed system clock is synced (NTP) — not a time-skew issue
  • Confirmed gst-plugin-spotify is already on the current release
  • Deleted credentials.json — it regenerated automatically via AUTHENTICATION_SPOTIFY_TOKEN, then reconnected via AUTHENTICATION_STORED_SPOTIFY_CREDENTIALS — same INVALID_CREDENTIALS failure on the very first play attempt with the freshly derived session
  • Did a full re-authorization at mopidy-spotify, obtained brand-new client_id/client_secret, updated mopidy.conf, deleted credentials.json again — identical failure, immediately, even with entirely fresh credentials
  • Confirmed the Spotify account itself plays music normally in the official app (phone/desktop) throughout

Since this reproduces identically even with a completely fresh authorization and fresh session, it doesn’t look like anything fixable client-side. Is this a known/current issue on Spotify’s side, or has anyone else seen INVALID_CREDENTIALS specifically at the login5 step (as opposed to the AP-level “Bad credentials” errors from the 2024 username/password deprecation)? Happy to provide full debug logs (GST_DEBUG=librespot:6,spotifyaudiosrc:4 GST_DEBUG_LIBRESPOT=DEBUG) if useful.

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(This message was posted in August or so, but was incorrectly hidden by the anti-spam features of Discourse.)