Spotify Got Rid of the Heart Button to Consolidate the Number of Buttons

The Gist:

• Spotify removed its heart button and replaced it with a plus, which allows you to add songs to multiple playlists at the same time.
• Spotify maintains that this is an improvement to the user experience on the app.
• The change first started rolling out in the early months of 2023, and has left some users confused.

Thanks to the fact that it's relatively cheap and very easy to use, Spotify has become the app of choice for many who like to stream music regularly. In 2023, though, many users noticed that one of the app's key buttons had disappeared, and they wanted to learn more about why that happened.

Spotify announced in February of 2023 that it would be removing its heart button from the app, a change that may seem minor but has had an enormous impact on the way many people use Spotify.

Spotify removed the heart button and replaced it with a plus sign in order to consolidate the total number of buttons available on the app. Now, the plus button can be used to add songs to "Liked Songs," or to add them to a playlist, or something else. In removing the heart, the plus button has become a one stop shop for any action you want to take on Spotify.

When you go to add a song to "Liked Songs," the app will then turn the plus sign into a green checkmark, which is there to indicate that you have added the song to your liked songs. If you want to add the song to another playlist, you can simply click the plus button again.

The feature is also available on podcast episodes, which allows you to move an episode you're listening to to "Your Episodes."

The featured first rolled out in the early months of 2023, but, in part because it was a relatively minor change, it took some time for many people to notice it.

Although the change may seem like something small, heart buttons have become fairly ubiquitous across social media, and are used on platforms like TikTok and Twitter to indicate that you have liked something.

Spotify has maintained that this is an improvement to its user interface, though, claiming that when they tested it, users were more likely to listen to songs they had added when they used the plus button. They also said that the feature made it easy to add songs to multiple playlists at once, another benefit that they believe makes the change well worth it.

The heart button removal is one of the smaller changes that Spotify has made to the app this year. It's also introduced "DJ," an AI-assisted bot that will play songs you have shown an affinity for with a DJ introducing and teeing them up. The feature is still being iterated on and improved, but if it proves to be a success, it could signal the use of much more AI technology across the app in the years ahead.