[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.

[TurboDiverArt]

Honestly, while totally not idea and bordering on unacceptable in this day and age....  At this point I'd accept only being able to "reshuffle" your play list from the desktop app.  Generally my playlists are long and take many-many days of listening to get thru.  Heck, if there were a way to download the list, manually shuffle it in Excel or some other equally stupid way and then reupload it in the new order and play from song one to the end, I d accept it at this point.  Since it appears that after 4 years Spotify isn't going to deal with it in-app, I'll settle for a way to do it on the desktop and re-upload the new order manually.

[rozeboosje]

"[Take] the list, [...] shuffle it [...] [to create a] new order and play from song one to the end"

Amazon *slap* Music's *slap* Randomise *slap* Playlist *slap* does *slap* exactly *slap* that.

Your problem isn't Spotify. Your problem is that you're too afraid to leave a platform that treats you like this or your lack of awareness that Spotify has long since lost its prime position in the streaming music industry. Starting as a new, innovative company that cracked open the ivory tower of the music industry it has now become a lumbering dinosaur unable to shake its lunatic notion that it can dictate to its listeners what music they should be hearing and when.

Trust me. The grass is greener on the other side. Spotify is dead. It just doesn't know it yet.

[oddindeed]

thank you for the suggestion, Roze. talking with some friends we are now looking into the possibility to migrate to Amazon Music.

[TurboDiverArt]

Apple Music family plan is tempting.  Family has iPhone's and AppleTV+ subscription already.  Spotify is allowing all 4 of us on the family plan.  Looks like for the same price all the music can come from Apple Streaming and costs about the same as I'm paying now for AppleTV individually and Spotify family.  Now how to export our lists and import them into Apple Music.  I honestly hate changing but I'm increasingly getting annoyed with no shuffle and being ignored.  I may end up like you and switch but continue to follow this thread because it's like watching a train wreck as it's happening, you can't turn away.

[TurboDiverArt]

Anyone know if Apple Music is a true shuffle?  I'd be surprised if Apple was left behind......

[Ladyishatara]

To provide some extra context... if you happen to also use Aleax enabled devices (Echo Dot/Show) you can only have 80 songs on the playlist if you want to use shuffle. Anything more than that and repeat will just cut off the playlist. Don't know if that is a limitation with shuffle off or not, but I now have a folder full of playlists curated specifically for playing on the Alexa devices in the house.

[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]