Spotify’s Broken Song Queuing

I’m a music junkie.

I listen to music when I’m alone, when I’m with friends, when I’m doing work, and when I’m relaxing. I love having access to unlimited music, all newly released music, and discovery playlists so I can broaden my music library. Streaming services are a great medium which allow one to do exactly that. In particular, Spotify is a streaming service which has gained a lot of popularity. Spotify deserves this popularity because many of its features work well. However, Spotify’s biggest flaw is its badly designed song queuing interface.

One of the most important aspects of a music listening service is being able to create the exact queue of songs that the user wants to listen to in a clean and effortless manner. Spotify’s queue system makes this incredibly difficult.

The perplexing Add to Queue button.

When the user selects a song from a list (playlist/album) to play on Spotify, the whole list gets added to a queue so that they will all get played.

Figure 1: Initial Queue when playing the first song on the album “The Sun’s Tirade”

However, when selecting a song and pressing the Add to Queue button, Spotify adds the selected song before the other songs in the current queue, in a sort of “subqueue”. Furthermore, any subsequent song you press Add to Queue on will get added to the end of the subqueue rather than the initial queue.

Figures 2: (left) queue when the user selects Add to Queue on “Money Trees” | Figure 3: (right) queue when the user also adds “Self Care” to the queue.

The first time a user presses Add to Queue, the song gets added as the next song which will be played, but the second time it gets added after all other subqueue songs, but still before the initial queue. Thus, “Add to Queue” feels like the wrong wording for this functionality. This model is bad for learnability and memorability since the functionality of Add to Queue is unpredictable.

Now the next natural question to ask is: Ok, maybe Add to Queue should add the song to the end of a single global queue of songs, but what if the user wants to play a song right after the current one?

The lack of a choice between Play Next or Play Later (Add to Queue).

Spotify should add two options when selecting a song: Play Next, or Play Later. One could argue that this would take away from the learnability of the interface since more options would exist to explore, however it would increase the efficiency of the model by a lot since once users learned how to use the two features, they would be able to make much more specific playlists, catered to their exact wants. Furthermore, by having both options it becomes apparent what each will do to the queue of songs so the interface might in a way be more learnable.

Spotify does not have any explanations online of why they have set up their queuing system the way it is. One reason could be that when you press a song from an album you might not want to listen to the rest of the album necessarily, so creating a subqueue with Add to Queue allows the user to create the queue of songs they want to actually listen to after the current one while still preserving the other songs in the album to play later. However, this issue would be solved by either a Play Next button or a Clear button. There could be a Clear button at the bottom of the queue so that the user can select a song from an album, clear the rest of the album from the queue and then proceed to add songs either next or later in the queue.

Proposed Design

Figure 4: (left) Interface when selecting a song | Figure 5: (right) Interface when looking at queue screen

Fixing these feature would not be hard to add, since there wouldn’t be any confusing long algorithms behind these changes, but rather they would refactor features which already exist in the app. There would be barely any implementation cost, but making a usable, understandable, and learnable interface could help them beat their competitors such as Apple Music, or Tidal, and monopolize the music streaming market.