Spotify’s “Like” button has been through some changes in recent years. It used to be a heart, then it was a plus sign, and now it’s… well, it depends.
Spotify Kills the Heart
Let’s refresh your memory on how liking songs worked before Spotify changed things in 2023. When you wanted to like a song, you’d pull up the “Now Playing” screen and tap the heart icon. After you liked a song, you’d see a green heart icon attached to it everywhere. To add the song to a playlist, you’d select the three-dot menu icon, choose “Add to Playlist,” and then pick a playlist.
Spotify’s old heart button.
It’s hard to get simpler than this old system. Like a song? Tap the heart. That’s it. However, Spotify wanted to improve the process of adding songs to playlists. So, it replaced the heart icon with a plus icon. Tapping it automatically adds the song to your “Liked Songs” playlist. That sounds just as easy, but there’s a flaw in the system.
The Problem
Allow me to walk you through exactly why the new “Like” system isn’t as great as Spotify thinks. I’m going about my business and listening to Spotify when I want to like the current song. So, I open the app, pull up the “Now Playing” screen, and I see this:
The plus icon that I’m supposed to tap to add the song to my “Liked Songs” has been replaced by a green checkmark. Hmmm.
My first thought is, “Oh, I’ve already liked this song,” but that’s not necessarily true. What the checkmark actually means is the song already appears in one of my playlists. It could be in my “Liked Songs,” or it could be in any other playlist. I have to tap the checkmark and look at the list of playlists to find out.
In this case, I’ve already added the song to five playlists—”Liked Songs” is not one of them, though. I can do that now by selecting “Liked Songs” and tapping “Done. But this whole process requires an extra step, and that’s only because I thought to check. It would be very easy to assume the song was already in my “Liked Songs” and move on none the wiser.
Look, in many cases, I don’t have the song in a playlist and I can simply tap the plus button. I get that I’m complaining about a very small thing here. However, in the situation I mentioned above, when a song already appears in your playlists, the new system adds a layer of uncertainty that didn’t exist before. I don’t like that.
Personally, I never had an issue with the previous system. In my mind, liking a song is something that should always be a quick in-and-out action, more so than adding a song to a playlist. But maybe I’m just one easily annoyed Spotify user.
