Smart playlists for Spotify, built from your Liked Songs
A smart playlist is a saved set of filters over your Spotify Liked Songs. Playlistation fills a real playlist from it and keeps that playlist up to date.
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A smart playlist is a playlist you describe instead of filling. You write the condition once, "artist tagged french hip hop", "released in the 1980s", "between 156 and 176 BPM", and Playlistation gathers the tracks in your Spotify Liked Songs that match it. The result is an ordinary Spotify playlist in your own library, and it does not go stale: the condition is re-checked on a schedule, so a track you like today joins every playlist it belongs in.
Spotify itself has no saved condition of that kind. Playlistation adds it from the outside, through Spotify's official API, without ever touching the playlists you made yourself.
What one is made of
A filter is one condition each liked track either passes or fails, and a smart playlist is the set of tracks that pass all of its filters. There are 18 of them. Nine work on every plan:
| Filter | What it reads |
|---|---|
| Artist | The artists credited on the track |
| Artist genre | The genre labels on those artists |
| Artist popularity | Spotify's 0 to 100 score for the artist |
| Artist followers | How many followers the artist has |
| Track popularity | Spotify's 0 to 100 score for the track |
| Duration | How long the track is |
| Explicit content | Spotify's explicit flag |
| Liked date | When you saved the track |
| Release date | When the album came out |
Nine more need the Plus or Pro plan, because they read Spotify's audio analysis or the language of the lyrics: Language, Tempo in BPM, Energy, Danceability, Positiveness, Acousticness, Instrumentalness, Liveness and Speechiness.
Combining them
Filters are joined with AND by default: a track has to pass every one of them. The pill between two rows switches that pair to OR, and they become a group a track only has to satisfy once, which is how one playlist covers two decades or three genres.
Under the list, the app writes out in plain language what the playlist will gather, so one that gathers the wrong thing says so before you create it. The operators, the groups and six worked recipes are in combining filters.
What keeps them up to date
Playlistation stores the filters, not the result. A background job re-runs them over your Liked Songs about every six hours on the Free plan, every hour on Plus and every 30 minutes on Pro, adding the tracks that now match and removing the ones that no longer do. Liking a track in Spotify is enough: nothing has to be pressed here.
That also means a smart playlist is always the result of its filters. A track added to one by hand in Spotify is removed at the next update, and a matching track deleted by hand comes back. What is kept is everything Playlistation does not own: the cover image you set, and whether you made the playlist public. The whole loop is in how syncing works.
Where to start
- From a filter you have in mind: create a playlist, pick the filter, save. Creating a playlist walks through the form.
- From your own library: the Discover page proposes ready-made playlists computed from what you already like, and the Stats page turns your top artists, genres or decades into one in a few clicks. See quick playlists.
- From a job you already know you want: organizing by genre, by decade, by release year, by BPM, by language or by the date you liked a track.
What they are not
Every track comes from your Liked Songs, so a smart playlist can only ever contain music you have already liked. Playlistation does not read your listening history or what is in your other playlists, and it never adds a track you have not saved. It is not a recommendation engine, and it does not discover anything for you: it organizes what is already yours.
Questions about Spotify smart playlists
Is there a smart playlist feature for Spotify?
Not in Spotify itself. Spotify can sort and filter what you see inside Liked Songs, and on Premium, in some countries, build a playlist from a prompt, but it does not save that condition and re-apply it. Playlistation adds the saved condition: 18 filters over your Liked Songs, and a real Spotify playlist that is kept in step with them.
How does a Spotify smart playlist stay up to date?
Playlistation stores the filters and re-runs them on a schedule, about every six hours on the Free plan, every hour on Plus and every 30 minutes on Pro. Each run compares the tracks that match with the tracks in the playlist, adds the new ones and removes the ones that stopped matching. Your Liked Songs are read at most once an hour, so a fresh like takes about an hour to be noticed.
Can I combine several filters in one playlist?
Yes. Filters are joined with AND by default, so a track has to pass all of them, and the pill between two rows turns that pair into an OR group where passing one is enough. The Free plan evaluates three filters per playlist, Plus 30 and Pro 100.
Do the playlists show up in Spotify?
Yes. They are real Spotify playlists created in your own library, private by default, and they play on every device where you use Spotify. Nothing has to be exported, and you never have to open Playlistation to listen.
Does it modify the playlists I built myself?
No. Playlistation only writes to the playlists it created. Your own playlists are never changed and their contents are never read, and Spotify's consent screen shows exactly which permissions the app asked for before any of this starts.
What happens if I stop paying?
Nothing is deleted. Your playlists stay on Spotify with the tracks they hold. The ones over the Free plan's quota of five stop updating until a slot frees up, filters past the third are ignored, and the nine premium filters stop being evaluated. Everything resumes if you upgrade again. See plans and billing.