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!

[KenF14]

Unreal

[KenF14]

Frustrating 

[FlyingPole]

This thread has been going since 2014 and spotify hasn't done anything to fix such a simple issue. It makes it feel like spotify doesn't care.

[francispotter1]

I've read the "How to shuffle songs" post and many of the comments on the various threads, and have also experimented with the shuffle feature on Spotify (both desktop and mobile), and I can say with high confidence that the shuffle feature does not implement either the methodology described or what most people would expect, when shuffling long playlists.

Specifically, the shuffle appears to be highly weighted toward songs in the proximity of the first song played. In the case of the main shuffle button, that means songs near the top of the playlist, as it is sorted at the moment the button is clicked.

I have a playlist with over 2,000 songs on it by a variety of artists. When I sort the playlist by artist and click the button to shuffle play, about 90% of the songs I hear are by artists whose names start with "A". If I reverse the sort, I hear mostly songs by artists whose names start with letters near the end of the alphabet like "W".

As another example, if I sort the playlist by track length then shuffle, my queue is full of short songs. Reverse the sort and shuffle again, and my queue is full of long songs.

The default sort for a playlist (and the only one that appears to be available on mobile) is by date added to the playlist. So when I use the "Shuffle Play" button on a mobile device, I generally hear the songs I added to the playlist first. Yes, the order is shuffled, but the selection of songs seems to be limited or weighted toward that group.

What's more interesting, if I double-click on a track in the desktop version, and the shuffle mode is set, I'll hear songs close -- in the current sort order -- to the track that I clicked. So, for example, when I sorted by artist name and double-clicked on an artist whose name starts with "J", I heard mostly tracks by artists whose names start with "J".

While this is all an interesting experience (it's kinda fun sometimes to say I want to hear the short songs, for example), I'm pretty sure the actual behavior is different from what the engineers/designers intended, and I'm also pretty sure it's rarely what anybody wants when they ask to shuffle a playlist.

Note that all of these observations are anecdotal, and all based on a 2,000+ track playlist, so it's possible I've got the details a little off. But the experience is reproducible on multiple devices with multiple experiences. And it would fully explain why so many people claim to hear the same few songs repeatedly when they shuffle a long playlist.

It appears that the developers apply the "How to shuffle songs" approach, but that there is some limit (perhaps based on memory or processor capacity) to the number of songs that can be shuffled. I'm guessing they just fudge and pull a few hundred songs off the top before shuffling. So it probably works well for albums and short playlists, but breaks down for longer playlists, which is really unfortunate. It would be cool if there was a random selection of the tracks to be shuffled, or some option to perform a pure Fisher-Yates shuffle on the playlist itself before selecting the songs, or something like that.

In any case, the experience is counterintuitive and suboptimal. As an avid long-time Spotify customer, I'd love to see some improvement in this area.

[rou70_-5eicjs]

My friends are having this SAME problem with my playlist on their phones. The algorithm seems to work on PC but not on phones?? Maybe this is inciteful? I have about 450 on my playlist.