[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.

[kubisen]

Yes please! I've got a very large Christmas playlist where in several instances, I have different artists' versions of the same song. These keep playing after each other, so I get the same song several times in a row. This is getting very annoying already and it's only the beginning of December...

[moosic1]

Does turning off the "Automix" feature on iOS fix this issue because I hated the fake shuffle and turned off automix when I found it and it seems to have helped some.

[lizziebella]

I agree with this. They should start the shuffle off with songs that are in your playlist that haven't been played before, or songs you don't hear often. This would be extremely helpful to me since I have close to 2,000 songs in one playlist and I keep hearing the same 100 songs all the time.

[CodeM]

Would really appreciate a true random feature!

[walkoverthere]

I'll echo what others have said: HOW can this still not be a feature? Another paying customer wondering why I'm paying at this point for what is an absolutely basic feature. 

[Bmac1997]

I second doing this. It’s been a problem for awhile and I know you guys are aware of it.

[ll_ug-5qcu0xc]

So terribly disheartening to see the shuffle feature continuing to be neglected. I have ~7000 songs only to consistently hear all/the majority of the Eminem songs from the three albums I incidentally have in my library. Something that has always bothered me a bit was thinking about how artists get paid on Spotify. Spotify pays the artists based on how many times across the platform that they were streamed. So if Spotify keeps shuffling the same artists time and time again, wouldn't that mean that there is a disproportionate amount of my streams that are going to an artist that the shuffle algorithm is biased to rather than to my actual tastes? Or creating passive listening farms concentrating on certain artists, making them appear more popular than they are, e.g. Drake's Scorpion? I can't imagine that it could be that hard to give every song an equal weight and randomize from there but I'm no engineer. It would be nice to know that every artist I listen to has an equal chance. It also makes it harder for me to want to add new music to my library because I know all of my other songs are going to get pushed further down and I will only hear the most recent stuff with a smattering of old favorites. What's the point of having playlists if they are all going to sound the same?

[llkoolkj]

This is still a problem!!! With a feature as widely used as this, I’m very surprised you haven’t fix this issue. In the meantime, you should consider renaming, “Shuffle All” to “Pseudo Shuffle Some Songs”. 

[teollo]

shuffle algorithm is very very bad.

there are many topics in this forum but spotify never cared to solve the problem.

honestly, I don't understand why. it would be very easy.

[ScoobyKitesurf]

I'm a systems developer and I can assure everyone commenting here that implementing a truly random shuffle would be a day or two's work for a single developer per platform. They would remove 95% of the current shuffle code to implement it. Spotify's algo is "being clever" and probably benefits Spotify on a royality level. As we all know, a "clever" IT system rarely helps anyone it should.