[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.

[RaulSe89]

Every once in a while i come back to artist and check trough their discography album by album to check what i liked and to see if there is some songs i may like now after second listening. I see some songs not liked but as i remember i liked these songs long time ago. 
When i check my liked songs playlist the song is there. If i like the reuploaded song there is duplicate(s) in my playlist(s). If i remove duplicate both songs are gone (new and old). I like to organize my music and this bug is really fustrating. The problem is reported way back in 2019 fist time. This is MAJOR bug and sould be fixed in fastest possible way. 

[a_aguinaga]

I have over 40 playlists and every time I come across a song that is familiar like a throwback song, I want to add it to my recent playlist but chances are that I might have already have it somewhere and instead going through all playlists (time consuming) this feature will identify if it’s already been added somewhere. This will minimize repeated songs to be added in new playlists being created.  

Why not add a feature that helps if a song has already been added to one of our playlists? 

[zerocontrast]

Seriously, Spotify, you HAVE GOT TO DO SOMETHING about these duplicates. I'm getting SICK of listening to an album, adding multiple songs to multiple playlists as I play through it, only to notice that I'm creating duplicates on those playlists because the artist/label re-uploaded the album at some point, and while Spotify is smart enough to know those are the same songs in terms of number of plays for the artists, it's too F**KING stupid to just have the songs replace the old IDENTICAL versions so that users can avoid the hassle of dealing with this half-ass programming.

[Raytracer]

Honestly I'm baffled by Spotify's unwillingnes to fix this issue for so many years. This is clearly a bad UX. You can consolidate play statistics across albums and EP's, you can hide "old" versions of albums with different ID's, but you can't consolidate likes? Either this is some truly weird architectural problem with your database that you can't fix without rewriting it from scratch, or you simply do not care about it enough. This makes me feel like I'm using a junk pirated service rather than a biggest streaming platform in the world.

[1121952796]

Problem: I recently had some extra free time and started curating my lists a bit more, but I quickly noticed that I had alot of songs that were liked/added to playlists twice, trice or even more.

Example: once: from the single, twice: from the album, trice: from the extended album, more: from a compilation album.

Another example of this being an issue: If I look at top 5 popular tracks of some of my favourite artists I notice some of the more popular songs are not liked, but they are... but I need to check first before liking them again or they get added double.

Solution: I'm pretty sure you have enough data on every song to somehow couple those TRUE identical songs (sometimes there are slight differences), that if one is liked, they all appear as "liked" or if you have one of them in your playlist it would give you the warning "add duplicates? y/n".

[1121952796]

Give this update! 🙂

glad there is already an idea with this many votes!

[1159128866]

Various "up and coming artists" with great voices try to break through all the time. I've recently discovered an artist called Mimi from Italy. She has a great voice - and as i like some of her songs, i dont like all. Mostly cuz of the language/category. When i find a song from an artist i absolutely love, i'd like to have the option to hit a "LIKE"-button.for that song - since some verions are better than others. Beit original, cover or an accustic verion.

Most of all to tell that artist i love that song/version of it. And also pinpoint to new listeners of the arrtist, that this song is liked by severeal people. This ultimately may give that artist more followers.

[Lexify]

Some songs on Spotify have different uploads in different album.

The existing "Already Added" alert only appears when you're trying to add the same song from the same album to a playlist. It doesn't notify you when you're adding the same song from a different album.

I believe Spotify knows they are the same song because both show the same number of plays, even though they are from different albums.

I wish Spotify would add an option for users to receive an alert whenever they attempt to add the same song from different album into their playlist.

[iluvatars]

As someone who listens to quite a few artist who pretty much publicise every song as an individual single and then collect a bunch of them in an album with maybe the addition of 1-3 new songs in the album aswell, this is extremly frustrating because none of the songs i previously liked or added to a playlist show up as liked or in that playlist. And it is in fact the same exact song with the playcount just being the same.
I would really apreciate these being consolidated with an option to also chose which cover (album or single) to take.

[someotherdan]

Almost 11 years and still no fix on this. Jesus f***king C****t, Spotify, get your s**t together. I'm glad we canceled our family plan. Between this and the literally non-functional 'Hide' options, it's as though you really give absolutely zero f***s about the end-user experience. Oh wait, that's not what brings you money, so I suppose that likely is the case.