One of the most magnificent features of Spotify is the ease with which you can create, alter and adjust playlists. Whether you are on the free or premium version of the service you have access to an incredibly vast library of songs that spans most of the popular artists of today as well as some lesser-known names you might not have come across otherwise.
The result? It is. that you can make a playlist for every party and every mood if you are so inclined and even better you can use other people’s public playlists as a guide where you can copy the whole list or some of the songs they have curated and add to them in your own list. The possibilities are endless. Spotify also has a relatively good algorithm for sensing the mood of your list based on what is already in it and suggesting more songs you might enjoy adding.
Although you can manage your playlists and create new ones on the Android/IOS apps the features you have available on the desktop app are superior by a wide margin and will save you a lot of time. For this reason, we suggest editing and working with playlists mainly using a computer unless you don’t have access to one, or you are only making minor tweaks; think just removing or adding a few songs.
You can, for example, copy whole playlists on the desktop app, something you can’t do on the mobile apps. Selecting multiple songs out of an album or a list is also a possibility. Below we walk you through how to copy a whole playlist, but also how to copy parts of a list, just in case you want to be a bit more selective.
Table of Contents
Selecting Songs on Spotify Desktop App
Perquisites for being able to work with your playlist are of course logging into your Spotify account on a desktop app, so go ahead and get on that! Once you’re in think about what you want to do, and follow the steps below.
Copying a whole playlist
Spotify offers great keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting songs, below we walk you through how to use these to copy a whole playlist:
- Open the playlist you want to copy
- Click Crtl + A for Windows or Command + A for Mac
- This will select all the songs in the list
- Press Crtl + C or Command + C to copy the selected songs
- You can then navigate to the new playlist and paste them by pressing Crtl + V or Command + V
Notes;
- If you want a new playlist it’s a good idea to create this first
- You can use the keyboard shortcut to select all songs for another reason like moving songs from your “liked songs” or a new album by your favorite artist to a playlist
Selecting a Few Songs
If you just want a few songs and not everything you can still select them. To do this you press and hold Ctrl on Windows or Command on Mac then use your trackpad or mouse to select the songs you want.
Once you’ve selected your songs you have a number of options for what you can do;
- You can copy them to paste into another playlist
- You can drag and drop them into a new playlist
- You can Right-Click then select “Add to playlist” and add them to a list this way
- You can drag and drop them up and down in the current playlist if you want to change the order of the songs
Selecting Consecutive Songs
Occasionally you want to move a whole block of songs or copy it. To select any number of consecutive songs;
- Navigate to the songs
- Press and hold shift
- Click the top song
- Click the bottom song
The songs you’ve selected and all the ones in-between should be highlighted. You can now drag them up and down in the playlist, copy them, drag them to another list, and so on.
You can also copy a whole playlist using this method by clicking on the top than the bottom song in the list while holding shift then pressing the keyboard shortcut for copy once the songs are highlighted.
Summary
You can use the same keyboard shortcuts to select, copy, and paste playlists on Spotify as you do for other applications on the Spotify Desktop app. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to do this on the Android and iOS apps, which users have been requesting Spotify to provide a path to for years.
