How to clean up "Your Episodes"

[signorbolle]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

Operating System

Android 15

My Question or Issue

I recently discovered that my "Your Episodes" playlist is full at 7,433 episodes because episodes have been automatically getting added and downloaded without Spotify ever removing them. Now I can't add individual episodes on my own without cleaning out the whole playlist. I find it extremely tedious and frustrating to do it one episode at a time. Is there a way to either select multiple podcast episodes from the "Your Episodes" playlist and remove them? Or maybe a way to remove all older than X days? Guess I'd even settle for being able to reset the whole playlist at this point and just start over. I'm almost reconsidering my choice to use Spotify for podcasts. 

[Eni]

Hey there @signorbolle, 

Thanks for getting in touch about this here in the Community! 

The Your Episodes playlist is being populated with podcast content you've liked and/or downloaded, so it's possible that you've enabled Auto-download episodes in the podcast's settings. You can turn this option off for the podcasts you'd like to by tapping on the gear icon in Your episodes playlist. Also, form this icon you can select the option "Remove played episodes" so that episodes you already listened to will be removed after the period you choose from the list. 

Currently, we're afraid there's no option to remove multiple episodes at once. However, it looks like other users would like to have this option as well and posted the following ideas: 

• Multi-select podcast episodes
• Batch removal from Your Episodes

You can add your vote to these ideas by clicking on the Thumbs up icon, if you'd like to have this option in the future. 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. Check out this FAQ to learn more about it. 

Hope this clears things up. If you need a hand with anything else, the Community is here for you. 

[signorbolle]

Thank you for sharing that. I'm afraid that doesn't solve my problem, however. There's more podcast episodes in that playlist now than I have time to listen to, so the "Remove played episodes" option won't help me. I have the " Auto-download episodes" option enabled because I'm frequently in situations where cell reception is spotty and I like to have episodes available. I guess I didn't realize that it wouldn't remove episodes after they exceeded the defined limit. This seems like a major design flaw when coupled with the "Your Episodes" playlist having a cap on how many episodes can be saved in it.

Is there a way I can get in touch with someone from the Spotify team reset or wipe out my entire "Your Episodes" playlist? I'd like to be able to use it, but at this point it would be too much work to delete 7,000+ episodes one by one. I guess if I could start over with it, I would know to manage it better this time around. I like Spotify overall and would like to continue using it for everything, but this whole experience has me thinking I may be better off looking elsewhere for a podcast platform.

[AlejaR]

Hey there @signorbolle,

Thanks for your reply here.

We really appreciate your comments on the matter and we understand where you are coming from. As mentioned by @Eni above, we can confirm there's no option to remove all episodes at once from Your Episodes playlist. Nonetheless, there are 2 ways to remove episodes from there faster. 

First method
You can choose to remove the content from Your Episodes by editing the playlist directly from the Home Page on the mobile app. To do it, follow these steps:

1. Locate the playlist at the very top. You’ll find there the most recent content you listened to. If you can't see Your Episodes up there, I recommend you play the playlist for at least 30 minutes or until that section updates.
2. Tap and hold the playlist until a pop-up menu shows.
3. Select Edit playlist. From there, you'll be able to remove all the episodes you'll like by pressing the (-) at the left.

Second method
For the second way, it'll be necessary for you to set Your Episodes playlist to remove played episodes after playing. You can do this from its settings. After that, search for the podcasts you enable the auto-download option for. Open them, and go to its settings. From there, go to Manage> Mark as finished> Mark all as finished. That'll remove all the episodes from a specific show from Your Episodes playlist. You can choose to unmark them all as finished later:
 

We understand this is not ideal, that's why we encourage you to show your support to the ideas mentioned above. You can learn more about how your feedback reaches Spotify here.

We hope you found this helpful. We're always here to help.

[dhpatterson19]

None of these options are actually super effective. The lack of support with this issue makes me think there is something larger happening behind closed doors in relation to this section. At this point, you are just asking people to listen to podcasts through other means, which is just frustrating, considering the amount of customization available on the music side of the library.