[All Platforms] Consolidate duplicates

[Kerumen]

It would be nice if Spotify can recognize identical songs to avoid duplicates in your Liked songs and playlists.

This is pretty common for songs released first as a single then within an album.

For example, if you like the single one, the UI will not show the song as liked when you browse the album. And if you like the song in the album, you'll end up with a duplicated version in your library.

This also happens a lot for songs that you listen in Daily Mix or Discover weekly. If it's not the exact same song you have already liked before, the UI is inconsistent and you can save a duplicate.

Apparently, there is already an internal merge mechanism as the play counter is not split between the different versions of the songs. Maybe this can also be used to consolidate the UI.

Repost of https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Your-Music-Remove-Duplicated-Songs/idi-p/4546787 which didn't get enough kudos.

[Simantic]

Not just liked songs, but anything playing.  I'm so fed up with putting an artist on shuffle, and hearing the same song twice in a row multiple times because it was on a regular album and a "greatest hits" album or something like that.  Every song that has a duplicate always plays back-to-back every time, completely defeating the very purpose of the shuffle feature.  This happens on playlists and on artist listen.

[WoWgAmR]

This is a very useful feature. Looking forward to it.

[Xenia]

Hello there @charleskellom,

Thanks for reaching out here and welcome to the Community!

First off, we'd recommend making sure that you're rocking the latest update available as this fixes most issues with the app.

Just a heads-up, these days we have a 10,000 item limit for Your Library, which includes liked songs as well a albums. Once you've breached that cap, the system might get a bit unreliable when you want to add new items. 

Hope you'll find this info useful. Let us know how you get on and feel free to give us a shout in case you have any other questions.

[charleskellom]

First, as I said in my question, this issue persists on every Spotify
platform - computer, tv, mobile, Xbox...it doesn’t matter what version of
the app I use. Second, how do I know if I have too many items in my
library? Does that include artists too?

[AeroZ]

I’m pretty sure that the issue is the same old one - multiple “versions” of the same song/album. The songs/albums are identical but the URI is different.

it’s an old and annoying issue but Spotify says they can’t do anything about it if the artist re-uploads the same music again and again.

[Xenia]

Hi @charleskellom,

Thanks for getting back to us and confirming that this happening across all of your devices.

Followed artists are also included in the Your Library items count. In the mobile version of the app, the number of your saved songs is shown next to the playlist Liked Songs but I'm afraid you'll have to count the albums and artist manually. However, you should see a warning message once you hit the limit.

On the other hand, as @AeroZ mentioned, if there are multiple versions of the same song available on Spotify, they are all regarded as individual tracks. It should be fairly easy to identify if that's the case by searching for the song and checking how many matches you get.

Hope we were able to shed some light!

[AeroZ]

It doesn't matter how many matches you get.

For example I got Metallica - Metallica album saved into my library:

But if I go to Metallica's artist page it shows only one Metallica - Metallica album which according to Spotify is not saved:

If I now save the album that I found from the artist page I get duplicate albums in my library:

And this has been going on forever and it's very annoying.

[charleskellom]

Yes @ AeroZ. That's exactly my point. Just identifying the duplication
doesn't solve anything.

Also, again as I mentioned originally, yhe real problem is with the custom
made contact. Things like Your Daily Drive, Daily Mix, and other playlists
that used to sprinkle in unliked songs I’d never listened to, now sprinkle
in songs that are already in my library because the duplicates show up as
unliked. It’s degrading my Spotify experience because I’m not discovering
as much new music as I used to – one of the main reasons I preferred this
app over Apple.

Regardless of artists uploading duplicates, shouldn’t the system be able to
identify songs already in my library by title or some other method? With my
On Repeat and Repeat Rewind, Spotify recognizes the play clean versions of
songs I played for my kids instead of explicit ones. Why can’t it do the
same with this? It’s really discouraging.

[ulri3l]

I support this idea for another reason, but this scenario would be solved by it as well:

As a user, I'd like to have my liked songs consistently available, regardless of legal/technical matters in the background.

It's frustrating to discover that some favorite songs were missing from the shuffled 'Liked songs' playlist not because of randomness, but because the album was reuploaded and my 'like metadata' was practically lost. I've seen this happen with multiple artists.

[Xenia]

Thanks @AeroZ for clarifying. Now I see what you mean 🙂

I think that when there are re-uploads of the same album, liking a song on the younger album will also save that song in the older version, but not the other way around. 

If this is something you'd like to be changed, have a look in the Idea Exchange, to see if someone else has already made a similar suggestion, and if not post your own.

The Idea Exchange is a great way for us to see what our users are interested in and how many people like a certain idea. You can read more about it here.

There's an idea for consolidation of duplicate liked songs that you and @charleskellom might be interested in. If so, you can add your +VOTE and comments to show your support.

Let us know if there's anything else we can help you with!