[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.

[Mookpsu]

I can't speak for the other platforms but Amazon Music's shuffle is a true
random. I use an older version of the app for better compatibility with my
Chromecast so I don't have the "randomize playlist" option but I can open
any playlist and pick any song and it will cycle through the entire
playlist with no repeats

[rozeboosje]

I can't speak about Amazon Music's shuffle because I just have one "Favourite Songs" playlist with over 1,000 songs in it so it adds up to multiple days' worth of music so I can only listen to a few songs in "shuffle" mode, for example in the car, and every time I take a trip in the car I would just start a new "shuffle" so each shuffle stands on its own and there is no guarantee that I wouldn't hear songs I heard recently. That's just the nature of a randomizer, even if it was coded without any biases or weightings giving some artists or songs preferential treatment over others.

But the "randomize playlist" works fine, for obvious reasons as it just reorders the play list, and you can then play it from top to bottom.

[armedzerox]

That's the thing. I don't want to shuffle my playlist content because I want it to be sorted as the date I put it in the playlist. 

[rozeboosje]

Er..... surely then there is no problem in Spotify either? Once you're on Spotify Premium you can play your playlist in whatever order you create it in from top to bottom. This problem only affects people who want to listen to their large playlists in a "random" order.

[armedzerox]

Thank you for the reply 🙂

But I won't be here if there is no problem.

I usually play only one playlist containing 3000+ songs.

Still playing the same song in one session for some reason. FYI The repeat function is turned off. 

I don't know if Spotify do that on purpose, or it just the mathematical limit.

[rozeboosje]

To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if Spotify managed to *bleep* up their playlist even if you're a Spotify Premium user trying to play a playlist without having "shuffle mode" activated. With Spotify, nothing like that surprises me anymore.

[armedzerox]

Yeah true that...

It's funny that people even started promoting it's competitors here XD

And they will succeed to lure me out of Spotifak if my question is answered.

The shuffle that won't play the same song in one playlist containing 3000+ songs, is all I need.

[Ryd]

Cannot believe it’s almost 2024 and they still haven’t implemented this… It’s called shuffle for a reason, I don’t wanna listen to the same 15 songs on repeat 😭

[Kung777]

Chiming in to say I also wish the "shuffle" didn't play the same songs over and over...

[Shiv71]

I just logged on to say the exact same thing and I see I'm not alone! Shuffle doesn't shuffle, it plays the exact same songs on repeat and I have 100's of different tracks. No wonder my 2023 Review was the same as last year....Since this is a paid subscription, surely there is someone who can make shuffle actually mean, shuffle. When I'm in the car it's extremely annoying - and dangerous - to have to skip virtually every song on shuffle as I only heard it yesterday. I now find myself being bored with those songs. Please keep us update with any progress. Thank you!