Why no one-button remove song from playlist on streaming services?
On all the streaming services I've tried, if you are listening to a song and want to add it to a playlist, it's easy. You click on the three dots, choose "add to playlist," and select the playlist you want to add it to. But if you're listening to a song on a playlist and decide you want to remove the song from that playlist, the option isn't easily available. You need to leave the 'page' your looking at, find the playlist from a list of playlists, click a button to edit the playlist, search the (often very long) playlist to find the song, and then finally you can remove the song. Last I checked, this was the case on every music streaming service I looked at.
WTF? Why is this so hard? Why not have a 'remove from this playlist' option right next to the 'add to playlist' option? And why is this a problem on so many streaming services? Surely, at least one service would add this as an option (If one does have this as an option, please tell me).
Could it be a technical issue? Sometimes things that seem easy to non-experts such as myself are surprisingly expensive to implement. Perhaps the streaming services think the benefit to this option isn't worth the financial cost to implement it?
Could it be a lack of consumer demand issue? Designers correctly don't want to offer rarely used options because they clutter up the interface. Perhaps I'm just a weirdo in wanting to take songs off playlists when I get tired of them? Could it be that for most consumers the need to add a song to a playlist is very frequent but the desire to remove a song from a playlist is very rare?
Could it be a "nudge" design issue? I teach design and one thing I teach is how to design products in ways the nudge consumers towards behaviors that make the products more useful or enjoyable. Perhaps streaming services have learned that consumers like having really long playlists and are making it easy to add songs to playlists but hard to remove them, under the theory that this somehow improves the consumers experience?
None of these explanations seem very plausible to me. Am I missing something?
I've been bothered by this for years. I've searched the internet and can't find an answer, although I have found several other people who are also bothered by it. What do you think? And if you have inside knowledge on this issue, please do share.
