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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.

 

shuffle algorithm.png

 

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!

 

111 Comments
Kaano

I am having this same issue that everyone is reporting, shuffle is not actually random, it is prioritizing a certain artists/songs above everything else. Everytime I shuffle my playlist of 800+ songs I almost always hear this one song within the first 10 songs. I actually deleted the song because I had heard it so much I was sick of hearing it. This is a simple thing, why has it been years without a fix?

kneipe2

One of the biggest problems is that they're not randomizing, or at least not very well, their seeds which is one of the major challenges to creating a true randomizer but they seem to be completely oblivious to this fact or just don't care. As to the "Gambler's Falacy" section of their condescending and arrogant blog post they have their own fallacy in the logic they're using to (wrongly) justify their terrible ability to code and implement known algorithms. They use the example of a coin throw:

 

"If you think the coin has higher probability of deciding for Indian on Friday, you are wrong. Throwing the coin for a millionth time is the same as throwing it for the first time. After all, it is just a simple coin, it has no memory, doesn’t know who threw it, etc. So both heads and tails have the same probability on Friday – 50%."

 

The difference here is that the coin is not two sided. If you have a playlist or artists catalog with several hundred songs you are now throwing a several hundred sided coin and so the probability is no longer 1 out of 2 (50%) it's now 1 out of several hundred or, for say 300 songs, 0.33% that it will play. They use the example of a two sided coin to obfuscate the fact that their algorithm just plain sucks and obviously has built-in biases they're not telling us about. Specific artists and songs are given priority either because they wrote the algorithm that way or because they don't know how to write the program properly. Either way it shows severe incompetence on their part. They are probably also unaware of the issues involved with a mapping between continuous/sem-continuous sets of numbers and a discrete set, which is also an inherent problem with writing a good randomizer program.

 

They keep blowing smoke and throw in enough jargon in their explanation/excuse to make sure to confuse those that might not have a background in math, but it's fairly obvious they don't understand the math or computer science behind the problem very well themselves.

 

Keep up the good work spotify and then keep scratching your heads over why more people aren't signing up for premium.

Colach
Im not sure they are selecting music for me deliberately. Because they still play a lot of unknown strange music that i have in my list. I mean it does not matter what kind of tracks are in a list - the randomizer algorithm still sucks. So I think that its just an inability/ignorance on their part that the shuffle fails.

Shape up spotify programmers!!!
_daniel_

I am officially giving up hope now.

 

I have complained, I have experimented, I have sent inbox messages to Spotify staff, I have suggested, supported, kudosed... I even wrote a letter to the Spotify CEO on May 25th 2015.

 

Guess the result of all this effort?

 

Right, so here's my letter to Daniel Ek:

 

 

 

Spotify Sweden AB
To: Daniel Ek
Birger Jarlsgatan 61, 10tr
113 56 Stockholm
Sweden                                                                                                                                                               May 25th 2015

 

Dear Daniel

I love music. I really do. I listen to music when I get up. I listen to music on my way to work and on the way back. And I listen to music at home for hours and hours, every single day. I do love music.

 

And not just one song, or one artist, or one period, or one genre – I love it all. When I’m having breakfast, when I’m working out, when I have friends come over, even when I’m watching football. I love to listen to music just about the whole time.

Some time ago a friend recommended Spotify to me and I felt heaven was close. All the music was finally in one handy app and provided me with unlimited enjoyment, it seemed. It didn’t take long until I signed up for the premium version and I thought I’d never regret this decision. Despite all my love for music, however, this day has come. I started love-hating Spotify and I ask for five minutes of your time so I can tell you why.

 

It all started when I listened to a playlist on shuffle mode and recognised that some songs were repeating over and over again whereas other songs seemed to have never been played. I searched the Internet and found the Spotify community. In there I found a thread called ‘Your Ideas at Work: Shuffle Improvements.’ In this thread Meredith claims Spotify has solved a problem related to the shuffle mode. She goes on to explain how the algorithm has been improved and shuffle problems are an issue of the past.

However, if I still experienced problems after this post was written, how could it have been fixed in the first place? So I read and read and found out that Meredith was talking about a completely different problem than the users experienced. While Spotify fixed an issue where several songs of one artist might have been played in a row, users were complaining that particular songs of their playlists were played over and over again whereas others were never chosen by the shuffle mode.

Here are a few comments of your users:

 

‘The shuffle function still isn't working correctly in that it IS NOT random. I have a playlist with 400 songs and the shuffle function plays the same 50 -100 songs over and over.’ – shatkinson

 

‘I have almost 6,000 songs on my playlist and i hear the same songe over again in a single days listening’ - kjbllc 

‘…it's really annoying to have to take time to flip through 20-30 songs that I hear EVERY TIME I play the playlist, just to get to something "new".’ - mollieneff

 

Moisaras summarises it perfectly.

‘It's almost unbelievable to me that such a simple process is broken.’ - moisaras

And continues on to say,

‘It would be great if we could get some feedback from Spotify on this. It seems we are talking to ourselves here..’ - moisaras

 

But hey, Meredith returns.

‘…we're always looking for ways to improve/ gather feedback. Could you give us more specifics about what you're seeing? Is it all on devices?’ – Meredith

 

Feedback is given (pretty much the same as above) but nothing much is changing.

‘…this bug drives me insane!’ – Peter (47,000+ posts, heavy user I’d assume)

This is where I enter the stage and after a small experiment which took me hours to come up with and conduct I wrote about my experiences.

 

I created a playlist of 50 songs and conducted a little experiment: I shuffle played all 50x songs and to my surprise each song was only played ONCE until each single song of the playlist was played. After that the shuffle function started all over again and shuffle played the 50x songs all over again. In total I repeated this experiment four times and to my surprise it worked perfectly. No song was played twice within a 50x-song-cycle.

 

But because my feeling told me, something must be wrong, I continued with other experiments. I hibernated my laptop but still, the shuffle play worked perfectly.

 

Eventually I found the problem (at least what I consider to be MY problem). I listened to 25 songs out of my 50 song playlist and switched off Spotify. When I switched it back on again Spotify would still remember which song I played when I switched it off. However, Spotify forgot which 25 songs I played before so the whole shuffle play started all over again, also playing the 25 songs it had already played.

 

The same happened when I played a song from another playlist, artist or album. Spotify simply doesn’t remember the songs it had already played.

 

To be honest I’m not sure whether this means Spotify should remember the songs it has already played or not, or whether there should be an option to switch that function on or off. For me personally it means, shuffle works just fine in a lab environment. But in real life, at least in my life, where I interact and randomly choose to listen here and there and then return and forward and go back again, it means it is highly depressing and frustrating. So remembering the songs which had been played would just solve the problem.

 

It’s just a matter of time, I thought, help was on the way and the major bug that apparently no one at Spotify was aware of, could be eradicated. After all, the data I provided was well researched and could be repeated by everyone who was looking into the issue. So Spotify’s team could repeat it and come up with a solution – is what I thought. Stupid me.

 

That was on September 4th 2014.

Nothing happened.

 

Ok, I thought, maybe Meredith was too busy to check the thread so I wrote her a private message on September 29th.

 

Hi Meredith,

would you mind reading and replying my post in "Your Ideas at Work: Shuffle Improvements".  I conducted a small experiment and would be more than happy if you could confirm my results and even more, if a fix could be introduced.

 

Thanks a lot, best wishes

Daniel

 

Again I was hoping that this all was just a big misunderstanding and help was on its way. Stupid me. Again.

Days, weeks, months – nothing. No reply in the thread. No answer to my pm. No nothing – but the issue with the shuffle play. Every time when using Spotify. Every single time.

 

In the meantime users came up with really smart solutions, for example, SebastianSaint.

May I propose a solution?

Spotify Coders:
1) Create a data field for each song that stores the time I last played that song.
2) Whenever the player is on Shuffle, choose the next song from the current playlist only considering the 10% of songs on the playlist with the oldest LastPlayed value.

Here's my logic:
1) The current song will not be replayed until I have heard at least 90% of the other songs in the playlist.
2) It will work if I listen with or without interruption.
3) It will work if I switch between playlists containing some of the same songs.
4) The solution remains simple.

 

Sounds great, right? And simple, too. What else could Spotify ask for? Users spot the problem and solve it. For free. Great users, I’d say.

 

It’s pretty much one year ago when shatkinson first complained about the issue and still there is no fix. To be honest, I lost hope there’ll ever be.

 

Don’t get me wrong, if there was an alternate music player which would work for me, I was gone already. But just because there isn’t yet, this doesn’t mean there’ll never be one. And as soon as there is, I’m off (unless you start listening to us).

I also want to say I’m 32 years old, I have worked in several customer services jobs and all of that in a country to be known for its terrible service industry. But even here in Germany your behaviour would be considered unacceptable. I simply can’t understand how a global company is concentrating on new products rather than employing a few more people to moderate the forum and forward issues and suggestions to managers and developers and especially communicate with their customers.

 

Don’t you think we deserve some respect? After all, we are paying your wages. How can you ignore us?

 

And let me add one last point. Shuffle play is just one issue. Equally bad is the lack of an option which allows me to rate and tag songs. Just imagine how awesome it would be, if I could use several tags on one song and play all songs tagged, for example, with *positive* *electronic* -*dance* *120rpm* *cardio* *four and five stars* when I go running (*cardio*) because the sun is shining (*positive*), I feel like electronic but not dance music (*electronic* -*dance*), I want to go fast today (*120rpm) and I want to hear my best rated songs (*four and five stars*). Temporary playlists for each mood - that would be legendary.

 

But I don’t want to go into further detail here because, as you might expect, there is plenty of unheard threads and comments in your Spotify community you can read if you were interested.

 

I hope I made my point and I hope even more that someone at Spotify who actually cares reads this.

I still have hope left. Don’t let me down Spotify! Not again!

 

Best

 

 

Daniel

floyd831
I can't create a better post than this. Spot on!