[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.

[metabaron]

Switched to YouTube music last week, my 1500 song Liked Songs playlist now plays songs I haven't heard in years and shows no bias at all to any particular songs. Considering that Spotify continues to ignore this issue and that YouTube music also gives you YouTube premium (no ads) I consider this to be a substantially better deal than sticking with Spotify. If you have this issue, switch platforms or continue to suffer - Spotify will not fix this issue.

[Slip269]

Well I've had 2 of my posts deleted without explanation, I'm guessing the mods don't like people hearing the truth 🙂

I'll be definitely cancelling my premium subscription now!

[Alburr]

Spotify this needs to be changed! It is ruining my experience. I listen to huge playlists with thousands of songs but have to listen to the same 50 songs over and over. It’s making me look for alternative options after paying for premium for years. 

Such a huge flaw! It’s not smart like you think it is… it’s just annoying!!!! 

[rednblu]

Huge flaw!  Yes!

But as in any successful video game, there are wonderful Easter Eggs hidden in the Spotify players that come and go-- that sometimes work for a while and make my Spotify shuffle work perfectly without that same 50 songs that repeat over and over-- 

Right now I am listening to track 959 from a continuous and perfect shuffle that I have run since Monday at 9 am-- after running that two-step, 10-second force initialization-- take a jackhammer to the Spotify code-- that we all worked up on this and associated forums-- with only Sleep on my desktop Win_11 and handoffs to my mobile without stopping and without rebooting and without networking glitches-- so I am lucky as measured by last.fm continuous scrobbling and monitoring . . . .

We could give Spotify intimate details of how to make this shuffle work-- all under one button-- if they would listen . . . .

[Mookpsu]

Or you can just switch to another company that gives you a true shuffle by
just hitting the shuffle button

[rednblu]

Absolutely!  Well said!  And I have taken your advice.

Therefore, I will transfer to a better shuffler when I have found all the tracks and renditions that I like!

For right now, looking for new music, I make do with completely random scattered repeats due to restarting-- including re-initializing my continuous shuffle to include up to over 202K tracks together with new Spotify Sub-folders containing new organization and new playlist modules with new tracks and new artists.

For the last 90 days of finding new music that I like I have Spotify shuffle scrobbled 17,317 different TrackNames under one Spotify folder . . . .   with only two tracks repeated 4 times randomly and none repeated 5 or more times over the rolling 90 days of now 17,322 different TrackNames of shuffled tracks.

Hence in the process, I am compiling the performance specifications that I will require of this new and improved new shuffle service that I have not found yet.

[sithmith]

It's just ridicoulous that a billion dollar company like Spotify, doesn't have the knowledge to make a decent shuffle feature. Or is there something more nefarious going on and maybe you have some sort of artist package deals for this, to promote certain artists over other ones? Either way, how unfriendly you are to your consumers is something that we can all depend on! 

[rednblu]

I think there is a lot of heart in what you say.

[Slip269]

lets be honest, the shuffle feature came out when CD players first came out,  there's little effort in implementing the feature unless there's no payback in return for doing so 😉

[rozeboosje]

Obviously we are not privy to the inner workings of Spotify but let's make a few reasonable assumptions:

1. Spotify engineers are not stupid. A randomizer function is Programming 101. There is no technical reason why this couldn't be implemented.

2. Spotify aren't so evil that they are deliberately refusing to do this just because they like to see their listeners suffer.

3. If something isn't technically hard to do and it won't cost them a lot of money to do it, anybody who develops software would jump at the chance to implement something that would make their users happy.

So I can only conclude that the reason Spotify are not doing this is that doing this would cost them dearly. What I don't know is why. Contractual obligations? As I mentioned before, Spotify was the first serious legal music streaming service on the market. Picture it as a still pretty small company besieged by record companies and artists threatening to sue it out of existence. Perhaps they agreed to a few "sweet deals" at the time that now have them backed into a corner. A situation that later streaming services didn't have to contend with. Sometimes being the first at something can later bite you in the backside.