Your profile looks fine. Your streams transferred. Every link you ever shared is dead.
Yes. Your artist profile URL is permanent, but every track and album gets a new ID on every delivery. Switching distributors or re-uploading a corrected master generates a new URL. Every old embed, blog link, smart link, and bio link goes dead. Preserving your ISRC keeps your streams. It does not keep your links.
Spotify hands out two different kinds of URL and treats them differently. The artist URL (/artist/ID) is assigned once at the profile level and never changes. Distributor switches don't touch it. Re-uploads don't touch it.
Every track and album URL is assigned to a specific delivery. A delivery is the actual file your distributor uploaded. When you switch distributors, the old distributor takes their delivery down and the new one uploads a fresh one. The new delivery gets a new /track/ID. Same for /album/ID.
The same thing happens if you re-upload a corrected master through the same distributor. New delivery, new ID. The fan-facing profile page is identical. The internal IDs underneath are not.
Most distributor-switch guides tell you to preserve your ISRC so your play counts transfer. That part is true. Spotify uses ISRC matching to stitch the play counts from your old delivery onto your new one, so streams, saves, and playlist adds carry over.
This stitching process is called track linking, and it's the source of a widespread misconception. Track linking is a play-count merge. It is not URL forwarding. The Spotify Developer documentation describes it as a market-availability tool, used for handling the same recording in different regions, not a redirect for retired URLs.
The old /track/ID from your previous delivery is not redirected to the new one. It just goes dead the moment the old distributor pulls their version. Anyone holding that URL gets a "content unavailable" page or a redirect to Spotify's homepage.
The old track URL doesn't only live on your release page. It lives everywhere you or anyone else ever shared it. After a distributor switch, every one of these surfaces is broken.
Website and blog embeds: the iframe source contains the track ID, so the embed renders an empty player.
Press coverage and reviews: every blog that linked to your release in 2024 now links to a dead page.
Linktree and bio link entries: if you pasted a Spotify track URL instead of a smart link, that entry is dead.
Smart links built by pasting a Spotify URL: the smart link tool stored your specific track ID and still forwards to it. The ID is gone.
EPK and press kit PDFs: the PDF you sent to ten blogs three months ago has a dead Spotify link inside.
Old social posts: every Instagram post, tweet, and TikTok caption with that link.
You don't get notified about any of this. The fan trying to listen finds out first.
Not every smart link tool breaks the same way. The difference is how the tool resolves your release.
Smart links built by ISRC lookup (Odesli/Songlink, and some feature.fm flows) ask Spotify "find me the current track for this ISRC" every time someone clicks. If you preserved your ISRC during the switch, the lookup returns the new delivery and the smart link keeps working.
Smart links built by pasting a specific Spotify URL store the track ID at creation time. They forward to that ID forever. When the ID dies, the smart link forwards to a dead page. Nothing in the smart link tool detects this.
If you don't know which type of smart link you have, assume it's the URL-based kind and check after any distributor change.
This is not a Spotify quirk. Every major streaming platform uses delivery-tied internal IDs in their public URLs. Apple Music's /album/ID, Tidal's track URLs, YouTube Music's release IDs all change on re-delivery.
Every platform's URL breaks the same way after a distributor switch or a re-upload. Every embed, every smart link entry, every bio link pointing to a specific track URL on any platform is exposed.
The audit and fix process is the same regardless of which platform you're checking.
First, find what's broken. Run a link scan against your current bio link, smart link, and any release page you control. Test each streaming platform link, not just the top-level page. A scan catches what manual clicking misses, especially when platforms cache and show stale data.
Second, update every surface that you control. New bio link, new smart link entries, new embed code on your site, new PDFs for any press kit you still send out. For surfaces you don't control (old blog reviews, old social posts that aren't worth deleting), leave them and accept the loss.
Third, prevent the next round. Move to a smart link tool that resolves by ISRC instead of by stored URL. Use a release page on stable infrastructure that can be updated in one place. Set up link monitoring so you find out the moment something breaks, not when a fan complains.