The Ultimate Guide to Spotify Playlists Organization.

Version: 01
Tuesday, 13 March 2018

This is a guide for always having the right music for any kind of moment in your life. It’s based on my own preferences, but you should be able to easily adapt it to your liking.

If one wanted to get technical, one could say this guide turns Spotify Playlists from Folders-like things into Tag-like things. Sound good to me.

1. Create the “New” playlist.

Create a playlist called “New”. Whenever you stumble upon a cool song put it into this “New” playlist — this is something you’ll be routinely doing.

Clean it up monthly.

Every month, rename this playlist to e.g. “March ‘18”. Then create a new playlist called “New”. (I actually do this only every few months.)

2. Create the folders and playlists.

Folders with playlists.

Here’s the list of the folders you should create, and the playlists that should be created inside them. Take this suggestion and adapt to your liking.

Folder: Situation.

• Laid Back;
• Surfing;
• Working.

Folder: Speed.

• Intense;
• Smooth;
• Relax.

Folder: Feeling.

• Love;
• Introspection;
• Feel good.

Folder: Genre

• Erudite;
• Indie;
• Funk / Soul.

3. Process new songs.

Every now and then you’ll want to incorporate new songs (in the “New” playlist) into the existing system.

1. Open the Playlist Manager.

Go to https://playlist-manager.com (open source), and log in with your Spotify Account.

Alternatively you could deploy your own, if you don’t want to trust the maintainer of the project.

2. Select “New” and the Playlists under the folder “Situation”.

This will allow you to see new songs side by side with playlists.

Playlist Manager UI — no songs added to Playlists yet.

3. “Tag” songs with Playlists.

You can see in the screenshot above that I hadn’t tagged any song yet — i.e. hadn’t added to any of the Playlists.

You should go song by song, top down. For each row, you should click the plus sign (+) in at least one of the columns — adding the song to the Playlist.

Some songs were added to Playlists.

I generally try to have MECE Playlists, but do allow for exceptions — no problem.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Repeat steps 1–4 for every one of the Folders we created before.

4. Reap the benefits.

Now you have a fully organized Playlist structure, which allows you to find the right song for the moment.

Naturally, keeping your Playlists tidied up is an ongoing effort — they require maintenance.

I have used this structure for 2 years now and had no complaints. I used to do it manually, but having found Playlist Manager simplified it so much I decided it was worth sharing it with the world.

May you “hit the spot”.