To copy a Spotify playlist you chain the same two actions on either device, and the difference between them is narrow: desktop can take part of a list, the phone takes all of it.
Before the steps, one thing worth knowing, because it explains why those steps keep drifting between versions and why no two guides agree.
What Spotify documents, and what it leaves out
Spotify’s help pages cover creating a playlist and adding music to one. On mobile you tap Create, choose Playlist, name it. On desktop you open Your Library, click Create, choose Playlist, edit the details and save. Adding songs is documented on both: the menu beside a track offers Add to Playlist, and on desktop you can drag tracks in.
There is no documented command for duplicating a playlist. Spotify’s own instructions never mention copying one, and they never mention selecting several tracks at once.
That absence is the useful fact here. Every guide presenting duplication as a Spotify feature is describing a workaround built out of two documented pieces, and workarounds move when the interface moves. The two pieces are stable. The chaining is not.
The phone route to copy a Spotify playlist
Open the playlist, tap the dots beneath its title, and choose Add to other playlist. On the screen that follows, take New playlist at the top.
Everything in the source list goes into a fresh playlist owned by you. It works on playlists other people made and on ones Spotify assembled, which is the point for most people reaching for this: the copy is yours to edit and the original is untouched.
This route is not in Spotify’s documentation. It is reported consistently by outside guides and by listeners in Spotify’s forum, and the claim in older articles that copying cannot be done from a phone at all is contradicted by both.
The desktop route, and the part only it can do
Open the playlist, click the first track, then press Ctrl + A on Windows or Command + A on a Mac. Right-click the selection, hover Add to Playlist, and click New playlist.
Swap the select-all for a shift-click across a range, or a ctrl-click on individual rows, and you copy only those. Multi-select is the one capability the phone has never had, and it is the single reason to open a computer for this job. Like the route above, it comes from outside guides rather than from Spotify.
What a copy is, given how it is made
You are not duplicating an object. You are creating an empty playlist and pouring tracks into it, so the copy starts with the defaults of any new playlist and inherits nothing else.
That has one consequence people meet later than they would like. A copy is a snapshot taken at the moment you made it. If the original is a playlist somebody maintains, your version stops at the day you took it and never learns about anything added since.
Follow the original when the plan is to listen, copy it when the plan is to prune and reshape. Copying a curated playlist to keep it safe produces a list that quietly ages instead, and that is the wrong outcome for the effort.
Name the copy immediately. It arrives carrying whatever default Spotify gave it, at the bottom of a library that probably already holds several, and a week later you will not know which is which.
Sources
- Spotify, Create and edit playlists
- Spotify, Collaborative playlists
- Spotify, Playlist privacy and access
- Android Authority, How to copy a playlist on Spotify
- Spotify Community, Make a copy or duplicate of someone else’s playlist
- How to Make a Spotify Playlist Private and Public Again
- Four Ways to Share a Spotify Playlist and When to Use Each
- How to Upgrade to Spotify Premium and Choose Who Bills You
- Go Offline on Spotify: Two Switches That Do Different Jobs
- Remove a Song From a Spotify Playlist and Undo a Mistake
- Delete a Playlist on Spotify and Get It Back Within 90 Days
