When do you consider a playlist too short or too long? (#of songs)

[hydnj]

Created this playlist almost a year ago:

https://open.spotify.com/user/hydnj/playlist/78tCRdiiH81yr7Tti2vMOj

Slowly it has gained around 300 followers. 

My question:

With about 9 hours of music I've started replacing old songs with new ones so that the playlist does not grow any larger. Do you get annoyed by playlists with say 100 hours or do you prefer that?

Curious what most listeners prefer. 

Thanks for any feedback you can give. 

[chrispyan]

i personally think a bigger playlist has its charm but to just load up an artists complete discography with the some less fitting to the genre or just the tracks that arent that good is a bit of a shame IMO,

so a playlist can be as big as you can make it, on the condition of all the songs being great for the playlist.

[rowswar]

Depends on the playlist and what you're doing.  I work to Spotify most days, so i can easily tire of switching 1hr playlists all day long and prefer larger ones when I just need to focus. That being said smaller ones are also nice for various moods or activities (most ppl don't need an 8hr long workout list ;p). 

[cosmicmoose]

In my opinion, once a playlist gets over 5 hours there's too much content to keep up with. The exception for this would be instrumentals or playlists meant for background noise in which case upwards of 10 hours would be fine.

[crematedman]

@hydnj it depends on its purpose! for some specific themes as short as 50, for some broadly phrased ones I would think 500!

When mine reach 300 I seriously consider separating them into separate themes, to make it a more palatable listen. Over that is seriously daunting.

[zoero77]

A playlist can never be too long. As long as each song fits the purpose of the playlist then add as many as you want!

[dideke_prins]

It really depends on how wide your topic is! if you have a very wide topic it's alright to have a long playlist imo, but pls don't put 400 songs in one playlist, that would make it a bit chaos-ish I think... If you have that many songs you want to put in that particular playlist I would devide those songs into playlists which topics aren't that wide. 

Now I feel like I'm a bit chaos-ish, sorry! (I love your playlist btw!)

If you don't get me (which I completely understand), ask me! I'm happy to help.

Dideke

[stellzy]

Depends what the activity is really. I don't think I have never heard anyone say that a playlist is too long it just leaves room for skips and to discover more songs.

[1stSauce]

A playlist is too long when I find myself skipping songs, too short and I scramble for songs to fill the dead air. 20-30 tracks is satisfactory for me.

[user-removed]

Everything depends on what kind of Playlist one is building. If you are building a playlist to get a friend interested in one or a couple of artists / bands, 50 songs in a playlist minimum is needed if the artist / band has an extensive catalog of content.

Playlists have replaced what was known back in the day as Mix Tapes. If your playlist is focused in this direction, one needs to take into account how much listening time users will have on average with work, school, sleep, personal recreation where music listening might be limited in some fashion. I would say no more than 2 hours worth of music, which most music listeners can get into even on repeat listens if your playlists are much more Mix Tape focused.

There are artist discography playlists now, as that is my personal favorite way of immersing myself into artists music that has three or more releases. Putting an artist on play that has many decades of content can be wonderful, as one can hear how artists can change musically over their careers in the industry. These types of playlists do not need to have limits, as Spotify users normally organize them either according to favorite releases or in chronological date of release to take in an artist's work.

[RobCenteno]

I'm agree... depends on the playlist.

But i think that a list must last at least 15songs/1hour.

[xandromedax]

I listen to spotify casually so I preffer shorter playlists, about 4-5 hours long, but I think some of your followers might miss the songs that you are replacing, maybe they didn't save them nor knew the name and now they are lost forever. That's just my POV because I have lost a lot of songs like that.

[Leb3v]

What I tend to do most, is create new playlists every season or so, and the playlists usually accure ~100 songs before I decide to move on and make a new one. I try not to repeat songs on them, and a lot of them will have a sort of theme or genre - whatever I'm into at the time. 

[pabrown33]

I think a playlist shouldn't be under 10 songs, but should never go over 50 songs. Playlists can't be enjoyed if they consist of hours and hours of songs.

[TNeTeNZ]

If my playlists go below 300 songs I think it gets very repetitive... Maybe because I don't have a very diverse music taste and listen to genres that are almost the same (Sub-genres to Hard Rock and Metal mainly)

[Sebasty]

I actually agree with @xandromedax. If you don't want to make the playlist longer, then create another playlist for these "tracks that are too old". 🙂

Anyway, I prefer to keep my playlists short enough that loading them on the web player isn't too much of a nuisance and scrolling doesn't get too bothersome on mobile. I'm happy with max 300 tracks in a playlist. My daily listening dose is somewhere around 75 tracks anyway, and sometimes, when I get bored of my playlists, I just listen through artist pages.

I remember attempting to load up some large 2000-track playlist in that old flash-based web player. It crashed at some point. :') That's where my limit came in, about 500 tracks was acceptable.

[rossi1911]

In my opinion, the shortest playlist should be 50 tracks and the longest one should be 100 tracks. More than that, it gets repetitive and boring. 🙂

[NoSleep]

I agree I think 65-70 is that sweet spot for a playlist everyone is different though some people want to vibe to a playlist all day and others want to switch from one genre specific playlist to another it depends preferences change from time to time

[Monk_a3d]

I agree.

[user-removed]

Depends. I have an end of the year playlist and I try to keep those relatively short. Ideally somewhere around 20-50 songs (They're still works in progress btw)

But I have my "Ultimate" playlist which is just my every/any mood playlist which is nearing 30 hours. I try to shorten it but it's hard to go through all that. But it's also not really for everyone else to listen to it's mainly for me since it's all over the place in terms of genre.