I’ve been building playlists on Spotify based on musician and as I listen to them realize that not every album is good. Is there a way to remove albums from a Spotify playlist?
I admit, I’m a big fan of Spotify and listen to it every day. My favorite speakers are my Alexa (well, my Sonos One speaker pair, actually, but it’s still essentially an Alexa, just with better sound) but I listen to Spotify on headphones a lot too. Heck, it’s hard to find music that isn’t in their massive library!
The smart way to manage Spotify is definitely playlists, as you’ve already worked out, but while there’s lots to like about playlists, there are some rough edges too. The roughest? Removing songs or albums from a playlist. I’ll just tell you the bad news first: You can only remove individual tracks from a playlist, you can’t select multiple and remove them all at once. So it’s tedious…
Update: A colleague reported that with the same version of Spotify on his Mac that I have on mine, he was able to select multiple tracks and delete them from his playlist with a single click. Excellent. Please give that a try before you go one-by-one, needless to say!
With that in mind, let’s jump in and I’ll show you how to remove songs from a Spotify playlist. Here are my own playlists
Turns out that I apparently accidentally added a Tangerine Dream album to my New Wave and 80’s Rock! playlist so this is a great excuse to clean that up; it’s good music, but not upbeat and lively like the rest of the music I’ve selected.
A click and you can see the main info about the specific playlist:
The “•••” menu has lots of choices, but… not what we want. Oh, and you can’t really search a playlist either, so I suggest you sort by Artist or Album to find the tracks you want. I’ll do so by Artist myself, which lets me quickly scroll down to:
Hover your cursor over an individual track and another “•••” shows up. Click on it and you’ll see the menu of options for an individual track on Spotify:
You can see what I’ve highlighted; “Remove from this Playlist“. That’s how ya do it. Track by track. And yes, it’s tedious if you want to remove more than a few tracks but that’s just part of the fun of Spotify, I suppose. Anyway, that’s how it’s done.
While you’re here, however, check out some of the other menu options: I’m a fan of both “Add to Queue” and “Save to your Liked Songs” as other ways to create a list of your favorites. You can also share a track with your friends easily enough if that’s what you prefer.
Would it be nice to be able to select ten tracks and apply these sort of things en masse? Heck yeah. But even without that, I remain a big Spotify fan. If they could just fix their shuffle algorithm with big lists, however… 🙂