Duplicate Playlists: Where Do They Come From? How Can We Kill Them?

[OnceaDelgado]

Note: this is NOT in reference to eliminating songs duplicated on different/discrete playlists

Spotify Premium has duplicated some of my playlists. In some cases, several times i.e.

• sets of duplcated playlists are not uniform and
• several sets of duplicated playlists exist.

Occurs on both mobile and laptop. To my knowledge, my iPhone 4s is not a sentient being, nor is my 3 y/o Lenovo. I never got my Mogwai wet or fed him after midnight. So, I'm at a loss as to why these unholy things have been spawned.

Seemingly related to this issue in that I've noticed that the "weird" iTunes nested playlists are consistently among duplicates.

The only other patterns I notice in duplicate playlists:

1. They are always older playlists - towards bottom in playlist view, sequentially
2. Playlists made available offline are never duplicated

[MichaelJerzak]

You should just be able to easily delete them by pressing edit and pressing the minus button.

[gkey2112]

6 years on and this is still an issue, for me at least.

The answer given is not helpful to me. I have around 200 playlists, nested into various folders for ease of finding. What I'm seeing in the desktop version is that EVERY playlist appears twice - first in its expected place in the folder, but then there is a list of the same playlists in alphabetical order at the bottom of the folder list, outside of the folders. So when I have added songs to the playlist in one place, it is NOT syncing with the duplicate folder in another. When I go to play Spotify on my Amazon Echo for example, I'm not getting the playlists I thought I had added.

Deleting duplicate playlists is not an option, because for each playlist (more than 200 of them remember), I would need to go and compare the one in the folder with the one outside, see which one has the complete set of songs, delete the other one, and ensure the one I want to keep is in the folder. I'm not doing this more than 200 times! I haven't done it once actually, just in case deleting "one" copy of the playlist happens to delete them both.

Anyone know what to do about this?

[MichaelJerzak]

I’m going to go ahead and escalate this for you.

[Katerina]

Hey there @gkey2112,

Thanks for posting about this here in the Community!

Just to confirm, are you able to see any duplicated playlists when accessing your account from a different device or the Web Player? 

If everything looks alright when using your account on a different device, it'd be a good idea performing a thorough reinstallation on your original device following the steps in this Spotify Answer. 

If the issue persists on a different device, it'd be helpful if you could share a screenshot of how it looks for you. Just make sure that there's no private/sensitive info displayed when posting in the Community 🙂

We'll be keeping an eye out for your reply!

[gkey2112]

Thanks for the reply. I was seeing the duplicated playlists on all my devices including my pc3. O don't know about the Web Player.
I cant send you a screenshot because I have employed a workaround by creating a new folder called "Duplicate Playlists" and dragging them all in there, until I get around to monitoring and resolving any mismatches.
It's not a true solution but at least I know not to go into that folder for the definitive versions of my playlists. It would still be nice to merge the additions and deletions from each version of the playlist into one, if that history is stored anywhere within my account data.

[Peter]

Hey @gkey2112,

Thanks for keeping us posted.

Out of interest, when did you first notice these duplicates? Do you know if any particular action triggered this?

Once we know that, we can investigate the root cause of this issue and see if there's anything we can do on our end.

Looking forward to hearing back from you!