I’ve had a problem with Spotify for a while now on my Mac. The damn program opens up spontaneously all by itself unbidden. What’s really annoying is that it also frequently auto-starts and auto-plays tracks I didn’t want to play.

I found out that when I start my Mac, or start Spotify itself, there is another application which is automatically started called SpotifyWebHelper.

I’ve noticed that when I go into Activity Monitor and kill this app, the unwanted automatic start and play problem goes away. That’s good, but it’s not really the answer. The answer is to murder SpotifyWebHelper.

So I turned to the CLI, you can issue the command killall spotifywebhelper and press enter. That does kill it, but what I want is to prevent it from ever being run. So I unloaded it from launchctl and deleted it’s LaunchAgent .plist file. When Spotify starts, it puts it all back.

Then I went where SpotifyWebHelper is located and renamed it. Spotify repairs this as well. Then I tried to set the SpotifyWebHelper application in ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify so that it had no posix rights whatsoever by chmod a-rwx SpotifyWebHelper. The next time you run Spotify, it fixes it all by itself.

This is less of a feature and more of a virus. A zombie virus, you just can’t kill it.

But I have killed it for good, and here is how to be free of SpotifyWebHelper:

1. Quit Spotify
2. Open Terminal, killall SpotifyWebHelper
3. cd ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify
4. rm SpotifyWebHelper
5. cd ..
6. chmod a-w Spotify
7. Close Terminal, done!

After that, you will be free of the horrible SpotifyWebHelper bullshit and Spotify won’t automatically run and play things you don’t want it to.