[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.

[#2]

VERY FRUSTRATING~

[taidaii]

It's absurd that Spotify has been ignoring this direct and simple request from its subscribers for 4 years.

[Ivr]

People don't truly want a true shuffle. They want songs to be played equally often as every other song in the playlist.  

A flat random shuffle doesn't do that. And indeed there seems to be some precaching or some bias that ensures some songs get played way more often than the rest. It's very noticeable in large (1,000+ songs) playlists where some songs hit daily and some songs never appear all year.  

What people want to see is a shuffle option where the odds of a song being selected again drastically diminishes after each time it gets played, then slowly have those odds increase again with every song played in that playlist.

This is not true random. But to a human it feels like the truest form of random.

That way even if there's some systemic shuffle bias to certain songs, the odds adjustment will cause it to be 'ducked' from further place until other songs have had their shuffle-odds take a hit due to them being played.

Video games with lootbox systems use this same system. Each time a player doesn't receive a lootbox their chance of receiving a lootbox after the next match goes up. That's what people want when they say 'true shuffle'.

[zx6dude]

What I want, is for Spotify to shuffle all the songs on my playlist, play them all, and when it's done, shuffle them again. What I don't want is for Spotify to keep playing the same songs over and over again without any regard for the other 500+ songs on the same list.

[rozeboosje]

"shuffle all the songs on my playlist, play them all, and when it's done, shuffle them again. "

That's literally what Amazon Music's "randomise playlist" does.

"A flat random shuffle doesn't do that."

Indeed. Spotify uses an 80 song "queue" for its sad excuse for a "shuffle". If you scroll back through this thread you will find a GitHub project I uploaded with a mockup of this functionality that shows that even with it working perfectly "honestly", without favourable weightings for any songs or artists, on a playlist with 1000 songs in it you will start hearing repeats by the 110th song.

And Spotify's "shuffle" isn't honest, which makes things infinitely worse.

[Ivr]

It's been 4 years. It's quite vexing to see how Spotify treats this as some bonus feature even though the integrity of the shuffle underpins their entire product (safe for podcasts I suppose). A major blind spot arises due to their users not being able to articulate well what's off about it, but that doesn't mean they're impartial towards it.

I tested Amazon Music. Indeed no repeats no matter how many times you restart the playlist. That's what I want. And it doesn't need to be the case where the full set of songs in that playlist has to played before repeats occur. For instance, shuffling the cached songs or shuffling the playlist order every couple of days would serve just fine as well. But ruling out repeats until 80% or 100% of the (set of songs in the) playlist has been played is the simplest system, and if Spotify can't even manage to do that, then that's just embarrassing.

[Mookpsu]

As a now former Spotify Premium subscriber I took the final steps tonight
and uninstalled their app from all my devices. It was liberating and for
some strange reason I really want to listen to Cream's I Feel Free. I will
continue to follow this thread to see if Spotify eventually implements what
we all want but in the meantime, I will spend my time (and money) listening
to my custom playlists in a true random order on Amazon Music. Peace out!

[rozeboosje]

It's harder to leave this thread than it is to leave Spotify. I left, like, what, I don't remember, 2 years ago now? But I'm STILL following this train wreck of a thread LOL. Which is really odd because in traffic I don't rubberneck at all.

[oddindeed]

so you haven't played a song in years with your shuffle pos. so i have to manually play the song, and now yoU WANT TO PLAY THAT SONG FOR A MILLION TIMES NOWWWWW?!?!?!?!?! WHAT IN THE FUDGE!! Who made your algorithm? that person is not ok in the head. smh

[DrKriegerAUS]

I've quit spotify because of this issue in the past, only to come back years later and find it is still an issue!
And it doesn't manifest at first because in a new account playlists are short.  But once they grow to hundreds of tracks it becomes so obvious that shuffle is not shuffle.  It has even got to the point where if I 'shuffle' my liked songs at the start of a drive, the same song will always play first, and the next two or three songs are always picked from a pool of about 10.  

Now, because the same tracks are played on repeat, the 'algorithm' thinks I'm utterly obsessed with these 10 tracks and not only will shuffle only play them, but all the 'smart' suggestions are related to the same 10 tracks.  
All of the Spotify generated stuff is now useless to me.  It has generated its own echo chamber for me. 

I really want to enjoy some of the 1000+ track user created playlists for background music at work, and yet I'm stuck with the first 50 or so tracks playing over and over again.    A somewhat workable solution is to turn off shuffle completely and start the user generated playlists at a different spot every time, which works when things are randomly assorted in the playlist itself.  But most playlists are generated by adding an album at a time, in which case I can't get a 'mix'.  

We've now got 'smart shuffle' introduced to feed us but that again only seems to look at the top few tracks.  
Just literally pick a random song from the playlist.  I don't even care if the system doesn't keep track of what is already played - with a long enough playlist this is irrelevant.  Just pick a random number from 1 to the end of the playlist and play that!  How is it even a challenge?!  Stop trying to be so 'intelligent' and get the basics right, please.