[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.

[UndeadWaffle101]

Is there no way to overwrite the metadatas with songs that have the exact same info as the duplicates so this issue doesn't happen? It's so annoying especially since both versions are still technically on the app. Lately there have been so many times where this has happened to me where a song or a FULL ALBUM I know I have liked shows up in a Daily mix or the AI DJ but shows I don't have it liked. I go to the artist, see I have the song liked but that this is another version of the same exact song again. This issue is clearly not "Solved" and I feel like it should be a priority as it makes Spotify seem a bit amateurish of a platform.

This is such an annoying and bad bug especially if we have premium and download the songs because this means Spotify may play the non-downloaded version of the song using our cellular data and playing at a lower quality. Not to mention re-liking the song can result to duplicates of the same song in your likes or just removing the history of when you either first liked it or discovered it, putting it back to the top of your likes.

Additionally, if there's a "deluxe" version or alternate version of an album, Spotify should take a note from competitors books and make it so there's just "one" version of the song so it likes all versions of that song into one. Utilize the database and metatags, identify songs from an artist that have the same name and just merge them all into one. Make it smart, use the technology like you are for the DJ!

It's such an annoying bug and I'm so tired of this happening over and over again for years now and would love if it can be focused on a bit more. Thank you. 

[NekoJash]

I would love to see this implemented. I have so many songs as duplicates in my playlists.

[mw0]

The duplicate tracks/releases are a huge issue on Spotify. It's particularly frustrating given the fact that Spotify is clearly dealing with it on their end (by consolidating the play counts), but they're not dealing with it on the user end. This leads to so much confusion when trying to determine if I've already "liked" a song. If I liked a song on one version of the album, that needs to be represented on whatever version of the album is currently appearing. This is a music platform, we need to be able to organize our music libraries without worrying about an album being re-uploaded multiple times to Spotify due to whatever's going on with the distribution side of things. It's really terrible design.

[Chaosrider1]

They don´t care. Hasn´t been fixed till now.

[phts]

Here is an app, which can find liked tracks/albums which do not exist anymore, and let you at least fix them manually.

https://github.com/phts/spotify-phantom-liked-tracks

For example it found:

> [https://open.spotify.com/track/3HzWxmvpQU3QHQ59zw1X4V] Black Sabbath - Heaven and **bleep** - 2009 Remaster
! Track "Heaven and **bleep** - 2009 Remaster" belongs to the album [https://open.spotify.com/album/0Dj2B19o99FcJii6aPvMTr] which does not exist in the artist [https://open.spotify.com/artist/5M52tdBnJaKSvOpJGz8mfZ]
! Possibly suppressed by:
   "Heaven & **bleep** (Deluxe Edition)" [https://open.spotify.com/album/4a5cLDpHPzyFkJs8DnzRNQ]
   "Heaven & **bleep**" [https://open.spotify.com/album/46gHYWaRr052RGEiL5Dg7T]

Welcome!

[hiro64]

Sad that this remains a problem more than 10 years after a few of the comments here!

[EnigmaticEffigy]

This is one of Spotify's major user experience issues that has been a pain for over a decade. Spotify does not care about its listeners, both paid and unpaid.

I'm seriously considering abandoning the platform because of this and numerous other issues that stay unresolved and unanswered.

[karhu]

This is still incredible frustrating, and would love if Spotify was able to work on it ! devs ❤️

[davideric]

You guys should add a "View Duplicate Songs" link to the top of each playlist, particularly the ones which are more than 100 songs long. You deal with alerting people of EXACT duplicates before you add them, but there are countless number of versions of the same song even by the same artist which aren't caught by your "duplicate catcher". In order to remedy this, and quickly illuminate duplicate songs in your playlists, you should have a link or button at the top of the larger playlists which allow you to search for any duplicate song titles, especially by the same artist (though you might offer the option to loosen the search to only duplicate song titles to ensure you get them all). This would make it easier for us to remove all the truly duplicate songs which aren't being caught by your duplicate catcher which only catches the "exact same recording".

[jannington]

Lol @ seeing the first post being from 2014. Spotify doesn't care, or their backend is such a tangled mess they don't want to chew on it.

This is likely a separate issue, but I'm also seeing duplicate tracks in my Liked Songs from the same album (same release, not a re-release).

No idea how this is even possible?