[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.

[rozeboosje]

ONLY if it does the same thing as the "Randomize Playlist" option in Amazon Music. As I no longer have Spotify Premium I will not be able to check this myself

[MjBalls]

I have Spotify Premium and I don't know of any way to combine multiple playlists into one without just making a whole new playlists by manually combining multiple playlists. However, that still doesn't address the issue of shuffling. I still hear the same songs over and over again during multiple listening sessions. AND those listening sessions are often less than an hour long.. I'll hear the same songs over and over (that's with a playlist of over a 100 songs) and the listening session is only like a hour long.


​In summary, I hear the same songs repeatedly, even with a large playlist and a short listening session. I've recently been exploring alternative streaming services. I like the UI of Spotify but .... yea

[rozeboosje]

The issue is what you described in the second half of your reply: you have a large play list, you play it in "shuffle mode" and you keep hearing the same songs.

In Amazon Music, in addition to "Shuffle Mode" which may or may not be just as bad as Spotify's Shuffle, there is also an option "Randomise Playlist". That basically shuffles your entire playlist as if it's a giant deck of cards, and then you'd just play the entire list from top to bottom without using Shuffle. When you reach the bottom you will have heard every song exactly once, and then you just hit "Randomise Playlist" again...

I had hoped for you Spotify Prisoners that I had just discovered a similar feature in Spotify for you, but it looks like no such luck for you.

Yes. Very sad.

Anyway...

[Mookpsu]

Rozeboosje, thanks to a Christmas present I still have a Premium acct. I
just searched the mobile app and was not able to find this mysterious
"Reorder Playlist" link. I did discover that if you open a playlist and
pull down on the screen there is a sort button. Among the options is
"Custom Order" which sounded very promising however all it does is a one
time mix of the songs. I hit custom order, then A-Z, then custom order
again and noticed the song order was the same as the first time. So while
yes this should allow you to listen to the playlist start to finish in a
random order, it will alway stay in this same random order. It is
definitely not a true playlist randomizer since they're still dictating the
order in which you hear your songs. Since I still have Premium until March,
I use Amazon Music for truly shuffled playlists and Spotify for listening
to an album start to finish but come March I'll be saying bye bye Spotify.
However I'll still monitor this forum just to see all the people who sadly
still think Spotify is listening and will change

[linsomniac]

Spotify: Help me understand...  The ability to shuffle play from a playlist seems like such a core feature to any music player, cheap and expensive hardware players I had back in the '90s and '00s supported it without a problem.  It also seems so easy to implement, I implemented it on a pair of 200 disc Sony changers back in the '80s using a computer control.  My questions:

1. Why is this considered an "idea" rather than a defect?
2. Why has this defect been open 3 years?

This shuffle experience for anything but ~20-30 song playlists is really terrible.  Unfortunately, 98% of my listening is wanting to listen to a shuffle of a large selection of my music.  Spotify is a really terrible experience for that, but I've been holding on to my subscription hoping to find a way to resolve it.  But, I've just used spotify-backup to export my playlists and I'm cancelling my subscription.  I'd be happy to rejoin once you resolve this.

Edit: I've resolved this by writing a program to import my spotify playlist into YTMusic, and shuffle playing there.  I've heard songs over the last month that Spotify shuffle on the same playlist hasn't played in years.  Go over to GitHub and search for "spotify_to_ytmusic" it'll be under the same account name as I use here, "linsomniac".

[rozeboosje]

"I'd be happy to rejoin once you resolve this" was pretty much how I cancelled my Spotify Premium subscription 2 years ago. They don't care, OR their advertisers or the record companies have them so much over a barrel that they couldn't change it even if they wanted to

[former]

Still waiting on this… I’m just going to switch back to SoundCloud. 

[Undeterred]

https://spotifyshuffler.com

https://stevenaleong.com/tools/spotifyplaylistrandomizer

[rozeboosje]

I've said it before and I'll be happy to repeat it: If I pay for a service I would expect to get the most basic functionality "out of the box", NOT have to rely on 3rd party software that I would then have to trust with my credentials. Never gonna happen.

In the meantime, Spotify are axing 1500 jobs.

Perhaps if you gave your paying customers what they want you wouldn't be in this fix, Daniel Ek.

[rozeboosje]

I think the problem here is that Daniel Ek never realised that his business model changed. When he first created Spotify, he was only selling ONE product: An audience for his advertisers. Just like Facebook, Twitter and many social media platforms, the product is not the software you are consuming. "Free Music" was not Spotify's product. Spotify's product is YOUR ATTENTION.

So the business model was never "give the users what they want to hear". It's "play whatever keeps the users listening the longest, so that we can present them with as many ads as possible, which will make our customers (i.e. advertisers) happy."

Fast forward to when they introduced Spotify Premium.

Now they have TWO products they are selling. They are still selling "ears for advertisers" in their normal Spotify offering. But now they are also selling "Listening to music the way YOU want to listen to it" for those who are willing to pay for Spotify Premium.

And I suspect that Daniel Ek and his management team at Spotify are incapable of understanding that that second product needs to come with different criteria for what constitutes customer satisfaction. I don't think it has sunk in that Spotify Premium is a product for PAYING LISTENERS rather than PAYING ADVERTISERS.

Either that, or they have zero respect for this newer customer base.