I have duplicate songs in my playlists but deleting one removed both. How do I fix this?

[Hollymel]

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

USA 

Device

(iPhone 8, Samsung Galaxy 9, Macbook Pro late 2016) iPhone

Operating System

(iOS 10, Android Oreo, Windows 10,etc.) 16.1.2

My Question or Issue I see duplicate songs in my playlist but when I delete one both are removed 

[Amayy]

Hey there, welcome to the Spotify Community!  As another Spotify user, I will try to explain why this happens in a simple way.

Sometimes the artist or the copyright owner decides to publish multiple versions of the same content but with different metadata. They might take down the previous version and replace it with a new one or simply publish a new one with different metadata. In any case, you might see multiple copies of the content. They might look similar but they might have different data associated with them.

For example, this is single, but this is the album version of the same track. Now if you like any one of them, you will still see both versions on the platform. If your playlist is small you can take the following steps and manually filter out those versions:

1. Open your playlist on a Desktop or Web App.
2. Sort the tracks by Title.
3. Batch select the versions you want to remove and delete from your liked songs or from the playlist.

I hope that clears things up for you, feel free to reach out for anything else and check out this similar idea!

[Hollymel]

If they have different metadata then why do both come off the playlist when
I delete one?--
Melissa Holladay
Boulder, Colorado
**bleep**

[Amayy]

Hey, thanks for getting back! Sometimes the App might not be able to differentiate between the two. One version might be taken down but unless you remove it, it will still appear. The next time you add the track or search for it, you'll only see the one live version for it. I hope that explains it. Do vote for the mentioned Idea if you want.

[Hollymel]

Thank you for the explanation. That makes cleaning up my playlist pretty
labor intensive- deleting them adding back all the dupes will take a lot of
time! The playlist has over a thousand songs and right now 300 are
duplicate songs.

[Amayy]

I understand this, I do have a third-party tool that might be just what you need. Head over to Spotify Dedup and you can filter out duplicates as it states. Do not that the mentioned service is not at all affiliated with Spotify and I cannot guarantee you that it is safe to use. Proceed only if you are sure about using the tool.

[ffuryy50]

Spotify needs to fix this issue. Nobody should have to download a separate app just to get rid of duplicates. This was not an issue in older versions of Spotify. I have thousands of songs and none of your "answers" are practical. Getting rid of duplicates should be easy. 

[Bxdcherri]

Hi, I’ve got the same issue. All of my playlists now have duplicates, the one I’m trying to edit has almost 4,000 songs and some songs are on there 4 times! I delete one, but all of them are removed. If I use the third party software, will it keep at least one of the duplicates on my playlist or will it remove them all and I’ll have to go back through and add them?

[AceThug37]

Same issue here. Very annoying. 

[Crollur]

Does this service work on my liked songs or just playlists? 

[AriMar]

I loved Spotify Dedup - just bought you a coffee. 🙏

[AriMar]

Works on all your lists including liked songs.