I let Ask Google compose this for me based on a ridiculously long series of conversations about how to make this work.
ā ļø RANT TIME: Avoid Amazon Music! ā ļø
If you are thinking about trying or keeping Amazon Music, do yourself a huge favor and donāt. And let me be perfectly clear: this is true even if you opt to pay for their top-tier Premium service. Paying extra doesn't fix a broken layout or an absolute nightmare of a library management system. It took my husband DAYS to manually recreate his 2,500+ Apple Music library over on Amazon, only for us to discover that using it the way he actually wants to is literally impossibleāeven with a paid Premium subscription.
I just spent hours trying to do something that should take exactly one second: permanently sorting a custom playlist alphabetically by song title. You cannot do it. Here is the technical breakdown of how broken this app is:
Fake UI Filters: Clicking the "Song" column header on your computer changes your screen layout visually, but it fails to write that change to the database. It acts as a temporary filter, meaning your sorted playlist completely disappears and refuses to sync to your phone.
Disabled Operating System Shortcuts: The desktop app completely blocks standard universal commands. You cannot hold Shift and use the Arrow or Page Down keys to select multiple songs. Even basic features like Ctrl + A ("Select All") fail to function inside custom lists.
Navigation Glitches: The UI is incredibly clunky. Trying to use a mouse scroll wheel frequently fails to scroll the app window, and clicking a song title too quickly registers as an accidental double-click, completely ripping you out of the playlist and forcing you onto an unwanted album page.
Paywalled Solutions: Because the app is so limited, the only way to alphabetize a large playlist is to use third-party transfer toolsāwhich lock you out and demand a monthly subscription fee if your playlist has more than 500 songs.
Make no mistake: Amazon leaves these vital sorting features broken on purpose. Big tech companies intentionally strip away user control over custom layouts so they can force you to use their data-driven home screens, "smart" shuffled loops, and algorithmic recommendations. By making it hard to curate your own static, alphabetical lists, they trap your eyes and ears on their dynamic feeds, inflating their engagement metrics and pushing sponsored content. In my opinion, this anti-consumer design is a massive business mistake for Amazon. Instead of trapping people on the app, these clunky interfaces do the exact oppositeāthey actively drive paying subscribers away. When a platform strips away basic human navigation to feed its own algorithm, it destroys the user experience entirely. People just want a functional digital shelf. By locking down user control, Amazon is ensuring that users will abandon ship.
Yes, Apple Music is a bit more expensive now. But guess what? It actually works. It has intuitive playlist sorting, functional keyboard shortcuts, and cloud data that seamlessly synchronizes your custom track orders across your computer and phone instantly. Save your sanity. Don't waste days of your life building a library on Amazon's broken interfaceāpay a couple of bucks more for a premium platform that actually values basic functionality!
