How to Delete All Spotify Songs
Many music lovers using huge streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music tend to turn into drives at some point. After months or years of collecting music, you could end up with a huge library filled with tons of songs you might not want to listen to anymore, forcing you to skip them whenever you stumble upon them, ruining your flow.
Of course, sometimes there is nostalgia and you are glad to hear a song that you haven’t heard for a long time, but how often does it happen? Much more likely is a scenario where you become frustrated that you have to manually select the songs you want to listen to among so many that you have to skip.
So what can you do when you get to this point? Well, there are several options you can try.
Deleting a playlist
First of all, it should be said that Spotify doesn’t let you delete your songs in bulk. There used to be a very handy option in the desktop version where you could just click a random song, hold Ctrl + A , and then hit the delete button on your keyboard.
Unfortunately, there is no such opportunity for a long time. However, feel free to give it a try if you haven’t updated Spotify in a while. You never know when they might add this feature back.
But since most users won’t be able to use the Ctrl + A trick, your best bet is to delete the playlists. This is the only place where you can find your songs in a group and delete them en masse. Here’s how to do it:
Open Spotify.
Go to your library.
Select Playlists .
Tap the three-dot menu in the upper right corner of the playlist you want to delete.
Select Delete Playlist .
The above method is shown on an Android phone, but it’s pretty much the same for iOS, with the added convenience of making it easier to delete multiple playlists.
Instead of a three-dot icon, you will see the Change option . When you touch it, you should see the following:
From here, you can easily delete the playlist by clicking on the red minus sign on the left and confirming the deletion. Each song from the playlist will be removed. But if a song or songs are in multiple playlists, they will remain in your library until you delete all of the playlists in question.
If you are using a Windows or macOS desktop app, you can simply right-click your playlist and select Uninstall.
Filtering songs
While this isn’t exactly a bulk delete, it can still help you clean up your library. Scrolling up the list of music playlists, you will see a filter icon along with a search bar.
From there, you can search for specific playlists and music you want to remove, or sort them by various criteria. This is especially useful if you are trying to delete a specific artist, album, or genre.
You can filter the following parameters:
- Downloads are any song that you have downloaded for offline playback.
- Relevance is the songs that best fit your listening habits.
- Name – Lists your playlists in alphabetical order.
- Recently played songs are songs that you played recently.
- Recently Added – Filter the songs you’ve added in chronological order.
Saving the “Downloads” checkbox; you can add any of the filters listed above, narrowing your search to the ones that actually take up space.
Filtering makes navigating your music much more convenient and helps you remove unnecessary clutter faster.
Delete favorites
Spotify is great because it lets you quickly tap the heart icon on any song you like. This feature can be used to save songs to the Favorites playlist. Fortunately, you can delete them however you like.
While deleting them one at a time takes time, follow these instructions to remove Favorites:
Go to the library located in the lower right corner of the screen and follow these steps:
Click on the Liked Songs playlist.
Click on the little green heart icon
Click Remove.
This will unlik the song and remove it from favorites. It may be easier to do this from the desktop. Go to your favorite browser, log into Spotify and follow these steps:
- Click “Your Library” on the right.
- Hover over the song
- Click on the three horizontal dots
- Click Remove Favorite Songs.
This action seems to be slightly faster than from a mobile device, but you still have to uninstall them individually.
Clearing the cache
If you want to delete your Spotify songs because they are taking up too much space on your device, Spotify has a better option. One of the latest updates has a feature that allows you to clear your app cache without losing your music.
Before updating, clearing the cache meant your data was lost and all your songs were gone. It would be the most convenient way to delete all Spotify music. However, this feature is still useful for anyone looking to free up valuable space on their device.
The way to do this is very simple. Just go to the settings menu . In the ” Storage” section , you will see the ” Delete cache” option . Click on it and confirm the deletion.
The option is available on both Android and iOS and can be found in the same menu. It will free up a lot of space and still allow you to listen to your favorite music.
The lack of bulk delete functionality is certainly disappointing for some. It’s sad that there aren’t any good 3rd party apps that can make this happen either. If you really want to get rid of all your Spotify songs, only the above options are available to you.
If you have too many songs to manually delete, deleting each playlist is the best way to achieve your goals.
If you haven’t organized your songs into playlists, filters can help you remove songs you no longer need. When all else fails, you can always deactivate your account and start over.