Shuffle artist's complete catalog?

[jazzdrums22]

Hi,

I have a question regarding how Spotify shuffles an artist’s catalog.

When I search for an artist on the free desktop version, and click on the artist’s name, and then click “Play, the “Play Queue” gets populated with an assortment of the artist’s songs.  However, the Play Queue lists a very small subset of the artist’s entire catalog, so that when I click the green “shuffle” icon, Spotify doesn’t shuffle the artist’s ENTIRE song catalog.  For instance, upon clicking "Play" for the artist Sting, the Play Queue lists about 50 songs, but all the songs are from maybe 4 or 5 albums.  Sting’s Spotify catalog contains about 22 albums, so why is Spotify only shuffling 4 or 5 of the 20 albums??  Does the Premium tier’s shuffle feature behave the same way?

The weird thing is, when I shuffle the same artist on my Android phone, Spotify actually DOES seem to shuffle the artist’s whole discography (!?). 

Any clarification of this behavior would be greatly appreciated.

Thx, jazzdrums22

[dinomight]

Yes, it happens on premium too. It's pretty frustrating actually. Best I can tell, it has to do with the way the desktop preloads a few albums at a time. If you scroll down to reveal more albums before you start playing the artist page, it seems to offer a wider selection. It may help if you switch the album view from the list that displays each albums songs to the artwork view as it then loads more at a time.

[jazzdrums22]

Hi dinomight,

Thanks so much for that suggestion.

I just tried out your recommendations for shuffling a larger portion of an artist's discography.   Bravo!...your suggestions definitely seem to enable shuffling of a MUCH larger inventory of an artist's catalog.  It's odd how simply changing the view from list to full artwork apparently has such a significant impact on how the shuffle feature operates.

Much appreciated!,

~ jazzdrums22

[dinomight]

Yes, it's a fairly strange workaround, but I'm glad it helped!

[jazzdrums22]

Actually, I just noticed one more way to enhance shuffling an entire artist's catalog.  By toggling the green "shuffle" icon on and off a few times, the play queue appears to completely re-shuffle.  I just tried that with Miles Davis' voluminous play queue and arrived at a very desirable outcome.  Still learning....

[michaelv84]

What about on an iPhone? The shuffling is terrible. It just repeats the same songs from the most recent album and occasionaly throws in a song from another album, but at most it may shuffle through 3 different albums even if there is 10+ albums. Even when it throws in a random song from another album it is usually 2 songs from the other album.

[mrgross]

I agree, does anybody have a solution for shuffling all the artists songs on mobile (iPhone app)? When you press "Shuffle Play" on an artists page it only shuffles songs from the first 2-3 albums!

I saw the solution for this on desktop, but the album section is minimized on the iphone app so scrolling down to load the whole page doesn't work. Neither does going to the list of albums and scrolling through them befor hitting shuffle. 

This is a huge problem! I want to shuffle the artists whole discography not just the newest two albums!

[ThomasPromny]

Has there been any progress on this?
The solution mentioned above, scrolling down to the albums section and then shuffling, seems not to work anymore on Android.

This really sucks.

[Jeroenb95]

Indeed, it's pretty frustrating and happens at Premium as well. But clicking/scrolling on the albums in advance indeed does the job, as well as for my Android app as for my desktop app. Thanks for the advice @dinomight!

[blastiann]

Okay, so now it’s April 2020, has anyone found a solution on iPhone/mobile? I hit shuffle on a band like Phish and only 30 songs come up. No. I want to shuffle the entire discography, and you’d be crazy to make a playlist for every band that just contains all their songs!!!

I am honestly shocked as the hot garbage fire of Apple Music has this RATHER OBVIOUS FEATURE. Please Spotify, show at least some initiative and make something to accommodate listening to an entire discography. It would take no longer than 5 MINUTES to implement that feature!