I have more terrible ideas if you want 
Not really your requirement, but you might consider that only a handful of “favorite” playlists will actually be used in the end; and that you don’t need to present them all to the end user after all, rather let the admin set up this selected set of favorites. Then an option could be to make the thing extendable and define a “playlist” channel type. The playlist in question would be in the channel configuration, and the linked items would simply have the actions for the playlist as command options - trivial to add as buttons opening a menu in UIs.
This could work only if you have a limited number of playlists (say <10) which don’t change often.