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!

[geckhard]

I think Spotify doesn't actually play songs in a playlist in a random way. I have a playlist with more than 1700 songs, with hundreds of artists. Often, Spotify plays the same artist if not in the sequence (which has already happened) with few songs between reproductions. It is also not uncommon to replay songs from a playlist that have been played before. And that, if we think about a universe of hundreds of artists, as in the case of my playlist, is not appropriate. Okay, if I were to think in a random order, that means "any song", but one has to imagine a minimum "intelligence" of a random reproduction, not repeating an artist before reproducing another one that has not yet reproduced. And repeating songs, then, is ridiculous. You could associate the user who is playing the song, and check which artists and which songs have already been played by the user, to avoid repetition (just like the iPhone does, for example).

[NoShuffle]

After trying every ridiculous troubleshooting option to fix "shuffle", I've concluded that Spotify plays the artists and songs SPOTIFY wants to play.  For a playlist with well over a hundred different artists and several hundred songs, I can predict which songs will play with nearly 95% accuracy.  I suppose they have valid business reasons for playing the same 3 David Bowie songs EVERY time I shuffle the playlist.  I'm sure Apple is guilty of the same, but hopefully their favorites are slightly different.  This thread is 4 years old, time to bail.

[ianjohnwood]

About 4 weeks ago I noticed that I was hearing a lot fewer ads, but the playlist tracks on my free account kept defaulting to shuffle.  

If this is an incentive to switch to Premium, fine. But this is quite a major shift in Spotify's working model; has this been advertised at all? I've been going loopy this past few weeks wondering why my playlists weren't playing in order, trying to work out if my devices were faulty.

[pkpickles]

I really don't undstand this problem since a solution is very straight forward and simple.  In a set playlist of 100 songs why can't you develop an algorithm where you play song 1 and then randomly select the next 99 songs without ever repeating.  Currently, if I were to play a playlist of 100 songs on random 5 separate times, I would hear the same songs early in the listening.  Easy fix, unless Spotify "wants" you to hear certain songs

[dnm]

I've canceled spotify because they fund Joe Rogan and his misinformation.

Couple that with multiple year old fundamental problems with their garbage software, and I'm out.