Shuffle playing a couple songs (or more) from an artist too close together

[NoFunction]

Summary of the problem: shuffle tends to play two or more songs in a row by the same artist when it should be avoiding that.

Plan

Premium

Country

Iceland

Device

PC & Samsung Galaxy S9+

Operating System

Windows 7 & Android Pie

My Question or Issue

I have posted about this issue before (see here) but the only answer I got was that the same problem had been reported before with a link to that post but it was not the same and because my post was then locked I need to post a new one because this problem has still not been fixed.

The problem is that when I play any playlist on shuffle, by having the shuffle button on and double-clicking on a playlist, double-clicking on a song in a playlist or by clicking on the play button inside a playlist, and there are at least 2 songs by the same artist in that playlist, then they are paired togeather in the queue most of the time on every shuffle. And it does not matter if the playlist is long or short, I just created a new playlist today and I have a total of 17 songs in it with 2 of them by the same artist and when I shuffle it those 2 songs appear next to each other many times. I can go around this problem with this short playlist by shuffling a few times and watching the queue to see if the songs are together or not or I can just go to the queue and move one of the songs away from the other one but I shouldn't have to do that and it gets worse with longer playlists where I might even have a few artists with more than one song. And this happens on both my computer and phone.

Way back in april of 2014 you posted about Shuffle Improvements where you claimed that you had improved the shuffling algorithm "that avoids playing a couple songs from an artist too close together" but now more than 5 years and a lot of updates to the program later the shuffling algorithm does not work like that.

Please forward this to your team and fix this. And don't link this post to another shuffle problem post unless it's the exact same issue, I've looked through a lot of posts here about shuffling problems but none of them are reporting the same issue as I am. I've seen some comments on posts on other shuffling problems where people mention this problem so I know it's not just happening to me.

[NoFunction]

Am I the only one experiencing this annoying bug? It's been driving me crazy for over a year at the very least (probably a bit longer but I can't remember exactly when it started), will this ever be fixed or am I going to have to keep on shuffling my queue manually everytime I play anything?

[madthersh]

iPhone 8s

Spotify Version 8.5.28.852

Premium (Family Plan)

The only issue I've ever genuinely had (besides navigating this nightmare of a website) was with the shuffle algorithm. I have over 9000 songs saved, from all sorts of different artists, albums, and genres, however the algorithm seems to choose about one or two albums or artists and shuffle through those exlusively, maybe throwing a random song into the mix. It's infuriating.

[carrieoes]

I have a playlist that I frequently listen to that has 150 songs on it, with repeat artist on there and it’ll sometimes play songs by the same artist up to 5 times in a row... it happens every time I play the playlist on shuffle. I’m able to play music at work and coworkers have noticed it too.. please fix your algorithm bc it doesn’t seem to be that hard. It’s not just with one playlist either, it happens to me nearly every time I listen to a playlist that has multiples of the same artist. 

[luxvoyager]

I've been a Premium user since 2012 and this happens to me pretty consistently. Today I am listening to my "End of Year 2019" mix and it keeps playing the same artists 5 or more times in a row with shuffle on. Spotify, I love your selection, but using your desktop app often feels frustrating because things like this never get fixed.

[RvdM]

This is one of the most persistent problems on Spotify. It's not clear how Spotify uses randomness for their shuffle but it's clearly limited. Recently added songs clearly are played at a higher frequency than songs that have been added later on. This indicates that the shuffle either draws from a limited set of songs, or there's a skew in the generator.   

There are ways to test the purity of randomness. But I doubt Spotify considers this an important problem as people have been complaining about this since 2012 now.  

[NoFunction]

Well, it's now 2020 and the shuffle function is STILL not working properly, has development on Spotify just stopped? Once in a while the program gets updated but I never notice any change at all after each update, what exactly are they doing? If I had any alternative to Spotify I would've left a long time ago because of this bug.

[a1mark]

I've also had this for as long as I can recall. There's obviously a bug in there but you wouldn't have thought it that hard to fix.

Spotify - if anyone is monitoring these posts, let me know and I will cut and paste some concrete examples for you if that would help.

Cheers - Mark

[Jeremy · Accepted solution]

Hey there folks,

Thank you for your posts and feedback.

There's currently an idea about this. You can leave a +VOTE and Subscribe to the thread for any updates.

We're always testing things by adding or removing features to make Spotify better overall. We’re sorry that this means you’re not able to use shuffle like you wish to do at the moment.

We're constantly aiming to improve our features so we hope you’ll continue using it and find it gets better in the future. 

Once again - thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it. Let us know if we can help with anything else. We're always one reply away.

Cheers!