[All Platforms] Option to have a true shuffle

[jonathanleyerle]

So I’ve been noticing more and more recently that Spotify’s default shuffle feature doesn’t fully shuffle your songs. It does some sort of grouping to try to get similar songs together based off of what I’m sure is dozens of factors. Every time I shuffle a playlist (the one I noticed this with the most is ~100 songs and 6 hours of mostly full albums) it will group the songs mostly or completely together by album/artist, and given the number of times I’ve re-shuffled and checked the order there’s no way it’s just a coincidence. They also generally seem to be in the same order as well. If I hit shuffle play on a playlist it’ll generally put the same artists at the beginning every time.

With larger playlists of albums I am really not a fan of this shuffling method. If I have 6 hours of music on a playlist I will hardly ever have 6 hours to actually listen through the whole thing, but when I do listen to it I would like to hear all of the music on it equally, and not just the artist or two your algorithm likes to shuffle to first.

Anyways, I’m a reasonable man, all I’m asking for is an option to have a true shuffle (take all songs in the list, put them in a random order, and once they’re all played reshuffle them and play them again). Make it premium only if you want. I don’t think you should scrap the current shuffle algorithm because it sucks. Looking at some of the suggestions on here it seems like some people lobbied hard to have it that way. Just add an option for a true shuffle for those of us that don’t care about potentially getting the same song twice in a row.

[ShuffleEnthusiast]

FWIW, having the option to pick Fisher-Yates as a shuffle option would be very very helpful! I tend to have large playlists and often like to start shuffling from a song when I'm at home. It lends itself to playing the same sequences of songs day after day. This can be frustrating enough to abandon Spotify for a radio station instead. Please give us more shuffle options! Maybe including

1. FY across playlists,

2. Combinations of new songs we never played before in shuffle mode (binary flag users can opt into?)

3. FY + songs with some similarities to our playlists. Maybe let us set an epsilon parameter to control the similarity distance of song inclusion in account settings?

[higginsmusic]

I have 81 hours of music with more than 900 songs in a playlist and I want to hear all the songs, not just a subset. Your customers have been asking you to fix this problem for years - when do you plan to fix it? How many votes does the idea need before you pay attention to the problem? Please do something about it, or tell us how to work around your algorithm.

[zx6dude]

@higginsmusic that sounds like a very reasonable request, but Spotify is not a reasonable company.
They don't even bother engaging with their customers or ex-customers.

[stevemcgowan1954]

Only when they want yer money!

[pooyair]

That's why it's a successful business 🙂 😄

[swiftymcgee]

There is no logical reason that this isn't the default mode for shuffle.Every normal media player can do it.

[ISbit]

Sometimes when I listen to music on my phone and then come home, turn of spotify, and then shortly after tell my google home to play music, the songs chosen are the exact same songs that I just listened to on my way home from work on a playlist set to random. In same order, about 10 songs back from where I stopped.
Maybe this is a clue on why the infamous shuffle bug happens? (always ever shuffle the same 50 songs on a 2000+ big playlist)

[restaurant_boy]

"UMG and Spotify have never had any arrangement in which UMG ‘charged Spotify licensing rates 30 percent lower than its usual licensing rates for ‘Not Like Us’ in exchange for Spotify affirmatively recommending [“Not Like Us”]”, including ‘to users who are searching for other songs and artists.”

- So Spotify and UMG don't pay lower rates, but they aren't denying they have a different kind of agreement that plays the same song over and over again, I.e. broken shuffle?

“The suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue,” a spokesperson for the company wrote. “We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear.”

- Anyone else feel like something else might be masking the fact that fans are not feeling like they're choosing the music they want to hear? Maybe a broken shuffle system.

[m2nis]

"Maybe a broken shuffle system."

😂😂😂... ... ... 🤣 🤣 🤣 ... ... ... the most unlikely of all possible explanations...

[desert_comet]

Four years later and we STILL don't have the most BASIC of music player needs. I absolutely cannot stand the current Shuffle system and I feel like it has only gotten worse. 7000 songs in my library and it always opts to the same. exact. ones. EVERY TIME. It's laughably bad. I'm probably going to just start unliking songs that the Spotify AI THINKS I wanna listen to. That or just not use shuffle anymore because apparently there will never ever be a solution? Four YEARS? Get real.