[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.

[decker12]

Don't worry, they won't reach out to you. They asked for my input in September, I gave it to them, and haven't heard word one back from them since. Not even an acknowledgement of my message.

I shoot the Mihail guy a private message every couple of weeks (For months I was friendly, now I just nag him for ignoring us) but he's never responded to a single one. And this guy is supposed to be a community manager? Here's the text of my latest reply to my already 7 ignored messages. Let's see if this one gets even a single one word reply from him:

• Hey! Mihail! My favorite guy here on Spotify! How's it going? How's life? Busy working hard with Spotify to fix that shuffle play problem I assume? That's gotta be the reason I haven't heard a single peep from you since September, you and the devs are just nose down 24/7 trying out every possible combination of features to fix that broken Shuffle play.

  Or are you just till ignoring me and ignoring the Live Ideas forums?

  Ah, don't worry about responding, I have no expectation of that as you haven't bothered sending a single message to any of us on the Live Ideas forum for months. I'll ping ya again next month just to keep the streak alive!

Despite this forum's lofty "Live Ideas" concept, regardless of how often you upvote ideas, nothing ever comes of it. It's a farce. 

Spotify will never fix this shuffle play problem.

This problem has been reported for literally years. The only thing left to do is speak with your wallet and cancel the service. 

[rozeboosje]

My guess is that "Mihail" got the sack for having the unmitigated audacity to take his paying customers seriously. That's not Spotify's Business Model!

[moxiedreams]

It's funny that this is still a "Live Idea" that people have asked for, for literal years. It's even more funny that this shuffle algorithm becomes a loop, because it repeats songs, and wouldn't that mean it's getting more "interaction" from me, making it repeat those songs even more often? Literally noone wants this.

I use Spotify Premium to find royalty free music and build playlists for a livestream. Guess it's time to cancel and find a new service that won't repeat as often, like Pretzel or something.

[decker12]

I also just noticed this Live Idea was submitted over 2 years ago.

There's been many like this over the years on this forum, but this particular version of the Live Idea asking them to fix shuffle play is now 26 months old.

Disgraceful.

[XeviaN]

March 2022.  So?

[teollo]

Dream on, dreamer!

[Threeringjugg]

• I'm not sure if this is an idea or more of a request. I listen to a gigantic 5000+ song Playlist everyday at work and I notice that it doesn't seem to move around a lot. I tend to hear the same artists back to back, sometimes back to back to back. I feel with that large of a selection it shouldn't happen. Is the random number set? or is it based on the amount of songs on the Playlist? I'd like to hear others experience with this. I listen 8+ hours 5 days a week and weekends.  Lol.

[Petereweiss]

I have nearly 10,000 liked songs. For me, the ideal shuffle would play every song exactly one time in a random order.  If that isn’t possible, I’d at least like the “random song selector” to be truly random, without regard to an algorithm that Spotify programmers think I want. When I start a “new shuffle”, I’ll often hear a song or two play twice within the first 50 or so songs, but always different songs. Or the same artist numerous times, albeit different songs. While I know this is statistically possible — **bleep**, anything is statistically “possible” — it is highly statistically improbable.  What I’m requesting is a simplification of the shuffle feature, at minimum driven by just a random number generator. Please please implement. Thanks. 

[rozeboosje]

@Petereweiss - that is exactly what you'd expect due to the inane implementation of a Queue of 80 songs over the play list you're in. After a depressingly small number of songs you will see it adding songs to the end of the queue that you already played. See the code samples I posted. For a while I thought that it's simply the stupidity of the Spotify developers at work, and I thought that by posting code samples to illustrate the problem I might be able to show them why that method is problematic on large play lists, but if you read through the entire thread here you will have to come to the conclusion that it works like this because that's how Spotify WANT it to work, and as a paying customer your wishes don't count. Take your own conclusion from that.

[kylekevinriley]

If you are having trouble with this, allow me to make an offer: I will implement this improvement for free! For the mathematically challenged programmers at Spotify, the process is called sampling without replacement and is available in excel or any software package. Please let me know as I am happy to help and we can improve the customer experience in no time.