[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.

[Picou256]

This is not a new idea, it's been brought up over and over for a long time now, and nothing changes... And now you even removed the "custom" sorting method, so that I cannot shuffle the songs myself... Guess it's time to change my music provider, fortunately Spotify is not the only one with great music library.

[SvenSvenson]

This is one of the reasons I don't pay for this service.  Anytime I'm tempted to buy away the ads, I realize I've been hearing the same artist for the fifth time in a day.  I have other ways of shuffling music that work far better and I haven't been asking for those for years.

[bytebodger]

They're not going to do anything about it.  They've been stubbornly denying the issue - and refusing to implement anything with true randomness - for YEARS.  That's why I created my own tool for doing true, random shuffles of my playlists:

https://www.spotifytoolz.com

[zakrom]

@bytebodger this is awesome man nice tool, thanks for sharing and making it 🙂

[Picou256]

Dude thank you! On pc randomising is a non issue to open random.org but this tool allows to randomise on mobile too! 🙂 

Also, it's worth it just for the recommended songs alone, the built in one sucks as we all know, with this just in the 5 first songs I hear 4 songs I've never heard before 🙂

[fluxlemur]

The shuffle algorithm must have changed recently! I have a ~200 song playlist that is roughly equally split between three artists and with "random" shuffle get streaks of 30 songs from the same artist at a time. This is terrible shuffle functionality imo! Hadn't ever noticed this being an issue for my past ~4 active years on Spotify, until this about last week.

[Moodflip]

I don't know why they would think their shuffle feature would be a good thing. In a huge playlist, a lot of songs get disregarded and never played. Nobody asked for this, give us true shuflle!

[Subnode]

This is my number one issue with the platform! I'm hearing the sames songs over and over again in my supposedly "shuffled" playlists - if I wanted that, I wouldn't need Spotify! I've had this issue with Spotify for years, PLEASE fix this. It's been brought up so many times here!

[CompleteCanada]

Please just listen to your paying customers, how hard can it be to add in a lil option in the settings to change from spotifys shuffle over to true random? This has been a problem for years and could be solved in a day.

[nicecorza]

Mine has been doing this for as long as I can remember, I don’t usually use playlists, instead I shuffle my whole entire library, and I still get the same 20-30 songs, so annoying!! I’m about to trial Apple Music to see if it’s any better cause I can’t stand it anymore.