[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.

[Slick001]

It is unacceptable, yet so on brand that a corporation would ignore PREMIUM USERS' (paid subscribers) basic wishes like this one for so long. When is the fix coming? I know the community volunteers are tired of moderating/responding to this post at this point. What are the engineers doing Monday-Friday? Is there any beta version users can trial for the true shuffle you all have been "working on" for the past 6 years? How hard is it to shuffle songs at complete random and remove the songs played prior from the queue? Will you ever give an answer as to why it's taking so long, or if it's even coming? How many people have to comment on it? I have a feeling it will be 2035 before the change is even considered. You guys don't care about any shuffle, you're too busy giving us live visuals during songs like that even matters

[Egregius]

I have this code running since September. Couldn't be more happy with it. No more the same songs over and over again. 

When a song is played it gets placed randomly in the last 10% of the playlist. 

It can even move listened songs from your other playlists to the end of them. So when you change a playlist you don't instantly hear the same song again.

It requires some shell and php skills to set it up. 

https://github.com/Egregius/SpotifyTrueShuffle

[zausi95]

It's ridiculous. We set a man on the moon in 1969 but we can’t have a real random shuffle in 2024. This is a default function in every programming language. There might be some limitations sure but it should be easy to implement in a way where it at least feels random also for big playlists.

The only reason I can think of why Spotify is not implementing this is the following:

They are making deals with certain labels and artists to pay them less per stream. Playlist generated by Spotify itself and the radio feature are implemented to play these types of songs more often to save money.

It’s annoying. When I work at home I can play a playlists with 1000 songs during a day. And yet it always plays the same ones. It’s hard to explore new music. Even on the Weekly Mix it seems to repeat songs which were there before. There might be 1000s of cool artists out there which deserves to be listened to, but I simply can’t find them. Spotify always shoves the same songs down your throat. It makes me mad!

[rozeboosje]

[josiahmcmenamy]

Has there been an update to this post? The update on 2021-09-14 was promising, but to my knowledge there has been no change to the shuffle algorithm. There is now the smart shuffle that adds song recommendations in, but given the number of people that want just a simple truly random shuffle, it should have been added by now. If this change was made and the shuffle is now truly random, I'll feel really silly. But I'm confident it still isn't truly random. As the original post mentions, I don't care if the option is buried in settings or made a premium feature, but there should absolutely be a way to make the shuffle truly random. I found this article from 2014 (likely dated now) explaining how the shuffle algorithm worked then, and the first sentence states "At Spotify we take user feedback seriously." Given how long this problem has been going on, this doesn't seem to be true. Please, I just want a truly random shuffle. It should take literally a day to implement.

[rozeboosje]

[teollo]

Dear Egregius,
this is very interesting, it is.
But I totally miss " some shell and php skills to set it up. "
Can you help me?
Can I direct message you?

[RedBowRiot]

So sick and tired of hearing the same eight songs when I turn on shuffle.

I have what I like to call "musical ADHD," when I turn on shuffle I don't want to be stuck in the same genre for an hour. I don't want to hear ten songs by the same arts back to back. I have 36 hours long playlists, I don't want to hear the same song again for 36 hours unless I actively add it to the queue. When I do my cross country drives, ai won't want to be messing around with my phone because I've heard the same song six times in as many hours.

My cache is cleared regularly (due to other Spotify failures), it's a fresh install of the app (since I was having video issues with my podcasts).

[WanTec]

Haha, without knowing the existence of this forum, I submitted this complaint to the helpdesk, which pointed me to this thread 🙂
Got a suggestion to click on different songs from the playlist and then change the 'algorithm'.
I have also once again indicated the need to prioritize and solve this mega frustrating issue..

[Darth_GTB]

Ok, now I understand why in a very homogeneous punk rock playlist, it would frequently play like 5 Ramones in a row. This is annoying. I was about to report this as a bug, but it seems to be on purpose... Shuffle should be at the very least random or if you want a nearly random algorithm, make it like it prevents from the same song to play twice in a 5 songs span sort or thing, but don't actively group songs.