Spotify Symbols

The two buttons people ask about most sit at the two ends of the Now Playing controls. On the left, two arrows crossing each other are shuffle: grey means the playlist plays in order, green means it plays in a random order. Under an active icon Spotify draws a small dot, which is why searches ask about the shuffle symbol with a dot: the dot only says the mode is on. Tap shuffle a second time on Premium and the icon gains a little sparkle (a four-pointed star) at its corner: that is Smart Shuffle, added in March 2023, which mixes recommended songs into your playlist as it shuffles. The songs it slips in carry the same sparkle next to the artist name, and a third tap turns both off. The cycle is off, shuffle, Smart Shuffle, off.

On the right, a loop of two arrows is repeat. Grey means the playlist ends when it ends; green means it starts over; green with a small 1 inside the loop means the current song repeats on its own, which is the setting people call repeat one. The emoji for all of this already exist, because Japanese phone makers drew them long before Spotify did: 🔀 is shuffle, 🔁 is repeat, 🔂 is repeat one, ▶️ ⏸️ ⏭️ ⏮️ are play, pause, next and previous. In plain text the same buttons are ► or ▷ for play, ❚❚ for pause, ↻ and ↺ for the loops and ⇄ for shuffle. There is no Spotify logo in Unicode, so there is no Spotify emoji to copy; the closest a caption or a Discord bio gets is 🎧, 💚 or 🟢.

The E, the plus, the green check and the other badges

A small grey box with an E after a song title means the track is tagged explicit: strong language, violence or sexual content, as reported by the label or distributor that delivered the song, which is why a clean edit can occasionally wear it and a rough one can lack it. With Allow Explicit Content switched off in Settings those songs grey out and are skipped. The E is drawn by the app, but the squared letters of Unicode come close: 🅴 (negative squared E, the best match in most fonts), 🄴 with a white box, 🅔 and Ⓔ in a circle. Playlist makers use them as a joke, as in 🅴 no clean versions, and nothing stops you.

The heart most people remember is gone: in March 2023 Spotify replaced it with a plus that saves a song to Liked Songs with one tap and opens a playlist picker on a second, and once a song is anywhere in Your Library the plus becomes a green check. A green circle with a downward arrow means the song, album or playlist is downloaded for offline listening. Three dots open the song menu (horizontal ⋯ on iPhone and desktop, vertical ⋮ on Android), three lines with a small triangle are the queue, a microphone is lyrics, a little screen above a speaker is Connect for playing on another device, and the moving green bars beside a track in a list simply mean it is the one playing right now. The small ℗ and © under every album are real characters: the sound-recording copyright and the copyright of the artwork and text, each followed by the year and the label.

Spotify symbols for playlist names: emoji, notes and separators

A playlist title takes any Unicode character, emoji included, and the pattern that reads best in a crowded library is the one Discord servers use for channels: an emoji, a separator, a short name. 🎧・late night drive, 😭 │ sad girl hours, ☕ slow mornings ☁️, 🔥 gym • no skips. Spotify's own community moderators put the title limit at 100 characters, and the app lets you edit the name and the description from the three-dot menu on any playlist you made. Two cautions from the same moderators: emoji and special characters are not guaranteed to display on every device, because Spotify shows them in whatever font the phone, computer, car or speaker has, and a title that starts with an emoji has been reported to switch the heading to a different font on iPhone. Put the emoji second if that bothers you.

The notes ♪ ♫ ♬ are the classic playlist decoration and survive everywhere, since they are plain text symbols from the 1990s rather than emoji. Stars ✦ ✧ ⋆ ★, tiny accents ˚ ₊ ‧ and brackets 「 」 ꒰ ꒱ ❝ ❞ make the soft, aesthetic names that Pinterest boards and TikTok playlist tours are full of; the Aesthetic Symbols and Cute & Kawaii Symbols collections have the whole wardrobe, and Hearts has every heart. Numbers belong in series: summer ☀️ vol. Ⅱ, ① warm-up ② run ③ cool-down. Keep one separator and one weight of star across all your playlists and the library looks designed instead of decorated.

Your profile name: 30 characters, any symbol, one honest warning

Spotify has two names for you. The username is the string Spotify assigned when the account was made (for newer accounts a random run of letters and digits); it identifies you to the system and you cannot edit it, and you never need it to log in. The display name is what everyone sees on your profile, your playlists and Friend Activity, and you can change it as often as you like, up to 30 characters, from your profile page in the mobile app or the desktop app (not from the web player). Any character counts toward the 30, so ✦ luna ✦ and ♪ Kai ♪ fit easily and ꧁༺ Kai ༻꧂ eats a third of the budget before the name starts.

Symbols in a display name come with a cost that the copy-paste sites do not mention. Fancy letters such as 𝓵𝓾𝓷𝓪 are mathematical symbols, not letters, so a screen reader spells them out one by one ("mathematical bold script small l"), friends searching for your profile by name will not find them through a plain keyboard, and some devices show them as boxes. A real name plus one or two symbols (luna 🎧, ✦ Kai) keeps you findable and readable. The same goes for a playlist you hope other people will search for: put the words first and the decoration after. The Fancy Symbols and Nickname Symbols collections cover the decorated-letter styles for places where that trade-off is worth it.

The text player: the now-playing meme, captions and Discord

The most copied Spotify symbols never appear in Spotify. They are the fake player people type under a song recommendation on Instagram, X, Tumblr and in Discord bios: a title line, a progress bar and a row of controls, like 0:51 ━━━━●─────── 3:14 over ↻ ◁ ❚❚ ▷ ↺. The bar is a heavy line ━, a dot ● for the playhead and a light line ─ for what is left; the controls are repeat ↻, previous ◁, pause ❚❚, next ▷ and shuffle ↺ in text look-alikes. The block characters ▁ ▂ ▃ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ draw the little sound-wave that stands in for Spotify's moving bars, and ▰▰▰▱▱ or █████░░░ make a volume bar. A caption that reads now playing 🎧 ♪ song title ♪ with the fake player under it is the standard Instagram story format, and the same text pasted into a Discord About Me is what the Discord Symbols page calls a status card.

Spotify Wrapped posts each December use the same toolkit: a 🎧 or 💚 before the headline, a 📊 or 🏆 for the top-artist line, and the fake bar for the minutes listened. Discord itself draws the Spotify logo in a "Listening to Spotify" status when the two apps are linked, but that logo is an image, not a character, so a bio that wants the Spotify feel uses 🎧 💚 🟢 or ♪. On every one of these platforms an emoji is only as green as the device drawing it: Apple's 💚 and Google's 💚 are different shades, and the plain text symbols ♪ ━ ● ◁ ▷ look the same everywhere.