Spotify now lets premium users hide songs they hate from playlists

By Simon Cohen April 16, 2020

Spotify and playlists. The two words have almost become synonymous. Starting today, everyone’s favorite Spotify feature just got a lot better for the company’s Premium subscribers, thanks to the ability to hide any song you don’t like from a playlist.

That’s right: Whether it’s one of your playlists, a playlist made by a friend, or even one of Spotify’s own human-curated playlists, you can now eradicate that one track — or two, or 12 — which kept it from being the perfect playlist for you.

Hidden tracks never really go away, they simply stay in a grayed-out state of limbo until such time as you decide to unhide them. Hidden tracks won’t play, but you can still see them listed on the playlist page.

The new feature is available for iOS and Android users for now; Spotify hasn’t said if it plans to add it to other platforms. Cleverly, once you’ve hidden songs on a playlist on one device, they should stay hidden on all devices that are connected to the same Premium Spotify account. We tried to reproduce this by hiding songs on an iPhone and then checking the playlist on an Android device, as well as the same Spotify account connected to a Sonos system, but the hidden tracks still appeared.

Still, whether this bug gets sorted out or not, being able to hide tracks from playlists is a fantastic addition to the Spotify platform, giving subscribers even more granular control over the music they hear. Previously, Spotify added the ability to block artists entirely, but that’s more of a thermonuclear option. Hiding tracks at a playlist level is like customizing the ingredients in a recipe to your personal taste.

Spotify’s playlists have evolved over the years to become an incredibly powerful way to hear, explore, and share music. For more on how to work with playlists on Spotify, check out these handy how-to guides:

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Contributing Editor, A/V

Simon Cohen covers a variety of consumer technologies, but has a special interest in audio and video products, like…

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