How can I quickly add songs to a playlist on the iOS app?

[venus1612]

Hello! I've recently come over to Spotify from Amazon, and I'm struggling with creating playlists on the iphone app (I have an iPhone XS and the app is up to date.) I have a lot of playlists, and like creating new ones for different events and occasions, but it seems to take forever on Spotify.

I know on the web player you can select multiple songs by holding down control and dragging them over, but that's a really clunky way to do it (holding and scrolling and clicking and dragging), plus the web player on PC/Windows 10 is pretty rubbish and often just stops letting you do things until you restart it.

On Amazon (and even on the old itunes/music app) you could create a playlist, then to add songs you could go into your existing playlists or liked songs and just scroll down, hitting the plus sign next to the songs you want to add, easy peasy. But I just can't figure out how to do this on the spotify app! If I click add songs, it pops up with songs Spotify recommends, or a selection of my liked songs in a random order I can’t change, or I have to search for each song individually. To go through an existing playlist or my liked songs and add some to a new playlist I have to click on the 3 dots, then click add to playlist, then choose the playlist., for EVERY song I want to add. It just seems so labourious, am I miss something glaringly obvious? Surely quickly adding tracks from your own library to a playlist is a basic function?

Plan

Premium

Country

UK

Device

iPhone XS

[Mario]

Hey @venus1612,

Welcome to the Spotify Community and thanks for posting your question here.

To avoid going through what you described every time you wish to populate a new playlist you created, you can use our Desktop app (which you can always download here) instead of the mobile one and CTRL+click (Windows) or Cmd+click (Mac) each of the songs you wish to add from another playlist, an album, or directly from browsing through an artist's page.

Then, you'll just need to drag&drop them all at once onto the playlist name which you'll see under PLAYLISTS in the columned list on the left side of the screen. 

This should save you some time 🙂

Hope you'll find this info useful. Let us know if there's anything else we can help with!

[Malik_smith45]

Is this still not a basic function on the mobile app? Seems like a huge capability gap, not being able to easily add songs to playlists on the Spotify mobile app. In 2025, we still have to individually type in each song or scroll through recently played, recommended, or liked songs? Am I missing this feature or are you still not able to add songs to a playlist from existing playlists on the mobile version?