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I'm trying to clean up my Apple Music library on macOS, but I can't find a way to delete multiple playlists at once. I don’t want to delete any songs—just the playlists.

Over time, I’ve ended up with hundreds of playlists, many of them auto-created by apps like Piezo, which generates a new playlist for every recording. Deleting them one by one has become incredibly laborious.

I expected to be able to Shift-click or Command-click playlists in the sidebar, then press Command-Delete or use a contextual menu to delete them in bulk—just like in Finder or Mail. But the Music app doesn’t support multi-selection of playlists in the sidebar, which makes the UI surprisingly rigid for this task.

Is there any way to delete multiple playlists efficiently without removing songs from my library?

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As of the time of writing (April 2025) Apple Music on macOS unfortunately does not provide a way to multi-select and delete playlists, even though this is standard in most Apple apps. There's no Shift-click or Command-click support in the sidebar, and no batch delete function.

Needless to say this is a terrible user experience.

But with AppleScript, you can safely delete multiple playlists in one go. Here’s how:


tell application "Music"
    set thePlaylists to every user playlist
    set thePlaylists to items 4 thru -1 of thePlaylists
    
    repeat with aPlaylist in thePlaylists
        delete aPlaylist
    end repeat
end tell
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  • You can also put the playlists into a "Playlist Folder", which when deleted removes itself and the playlists it contains. Commented Apr 6 at 9:50
  • Really? That is, in itself, shockingly bad UI. Apple used to be good at this stuff. Commented Apr 6 at 10:50
  • Adding playlists to a folder still needs to be a one-at-at time process. I can't see an obvious way to add multiple playlists to a folder in one go. Commented Apr 6 at 16:30
  • I agree that shift and command clicks should be implemented. If you could spare the time, suggest it to Apple - I'm pretty certain there are more people who would like to see this done. Commented Apr 6 at 22:00
  • Apart from that you could select "All Playlists" and then in the main window something like "Sort options: title" (by date only one year at a time can be bulk selected), which will show the sorted playlists, you can then bulk select by drawing a square around them, i.e. you start clicking outside the playlists and move the cursor so that the sqare selects them all. Command and shift click also work. Commented Apr 6 at 22:03

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