All my ducks seem to be in order and the correct configs in the right place. But i keep getting this message. As you can see the file exists. It is not empty, but systemctl cannot find it. Any help would be very very appreciated.
Why are you creating a system service for a user application? It will run Spotify as root unless you override the user. Did you know you can add your own services for your user at ~/.config/systemd/user/?
Anyway, your method to add the service seems correct (create a file and reload the daemon), so I suspect it might refuse to load the file due to a syntax error in the service. Also perhaps compare the file permissions with the other files in the systemd folder.
If you just want it to auto-start at login, you could create a symlink from the .desktop file to ~/.config/autostart.
Something like ln ~/.local/applications/spotify.desktop ~/.config/autostart (or ln /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop ~/.config/autostart if that's where it installed to).
I believe most DE's will pick this up automatically.
Spotifyd is a Spotify daemon, not an user application. It makes perfect sense to run as a service. Though personally I would run it as a user service instead of a system service.
Ahh I thought they were just making a service for the normal spotify application, yeah in that case it makes sense to use a service. Didn't know spotifyd is something else
Additionally if you're looking for it to start on boot without logging in, you might find the loginctl enable-linger command to be of use. Maybe along with a Restart=on-failure policy in the service file if this is for a headless unit or something