Your Ideas At Work: Shuffle Improvements

[meahtenoha]

The Community Ideas Board isn’t just about requesting new features. It’s also about improving the features already in Spotify.

Take our shuffle algorithm for instance.

The Idea “Implement an actual shuffle function” by Community user @RoninTheOrigina  gathered over 850 votes.  Users were vocal in their comments about what they wanted (and didn’t want) when it came to shuffling playlists.

We then passed this knowledge on and our teams got to work.

The result: an improved shuffling algorithm that avoids playing a couple songs from an artist too close together.

If you’re thinking, “that sounds kind of vague, what are these improvements” then fret no more.

Spotify’s @lukasP  has written an extensive blog post on how we gathered user feedback on Shuffle, analyzed their comments, took a hard look at our previous algorithm and found the best way to bring the improvements users wanted.

We’re aware this doesn’t fix all shuffling issues forever. Rest assured we are still working on this though.  You’ll also see the new algorithm in other clients other than desktop soon.

Now go hit shuffle on your favorite playlist and reap the benefits of your hard work clicking that Kudos button.

Enjoy!

[hans-jürgen]

When I converted my Last.fm listening history to several very long Spotify playlists, I sorted them alphabetically in a spreadsheet application before actually importing them with Ivy. So that way it is possible to save a playlist alphabetically, but maybe it also works if you sort an existing Spotify playlist and highlight all tracks to save them to a new playlist which keeps the new sorting afterwards.

Like mentioned before, for me the shuffle mode works very good on these converted playlists which I moved to a new playlist folder and play that folder at once in shuffle mode. It also works almost as good when playing my library of 9.4k tracks in Your Songs in shuffle mode, but I can see in my Last.fm scrobbling history that there are repetitions of a few tracks during a week, probably due to the 10k track limit in Your Music.

[chipples]

Just to put pay to all the 'conspiracy theories' surrounding this, there is no monetary reason for Spotify to prioritise one track or artist over another. If you take a quick read as to how Spotify calculates royalty payments, you'll see that every artist ends up getting paid the same amount 'per-stream' by Spotify. If artsts end up getting a different amount, it's because their label or management is taking a cut.

http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#how-we-pay-royalties-overview

[SR_Penny]

Sill doesn't work (and neither does Google Play) - subscription cancelled again. Currently testing Tidal, which is doing very well so far with the same number of tracks favourited.

[rfitenite]

Random is still horrible. in my 5000+ playlist i have heard the same song three times today

[ratnama]

The point in conspiracy of prioritizing one artist over another is not solved by the fact that each one gets the same amount of money for a play.

Actually quite the oposite. How can we be sure that the algorithm works really randomly?

I can clearly see that specific bands/tracks are played often and some artists (a new or alternative ones) are literally never played.

I'm not blaming Spotify to have a shady business going on, but there clearly is some sort of ranking of songs in use here.