[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.

[Sombat]

How many years have we been asking for this? What the **bleep** is the issue? Why is this so complicated? Seriously, all my playlists keep playing the same 10 songs over and over. Sometimes even playing the same song just after I heard it. FIX THIS ISSUE ALREADY!!!

[joe68w]

I think they are solving this by REMOVING song from playlists. I say it in jest but I constantly notice songs that I know were in my playlist come up with the option to add them because they are not on there. If I click on who the playlist is shared with (and I’m using smart shuffle) Spotify comes up as a contributor to the list and then Spotify takes credit for adding any song they recommended and I added even though those songs were on my playlist at one point. Not sure why they need to track that statistic unless they are monetizing it which would make sense as to why they keep removing songs from my playlists.

[Undeterred]

Good luck, Spotify don’t give a fųck; they already have your money.

[Grande7]

As spotify has grown from being $0.99 to over $9.99 they have added some great features, but this is not one of them. The software was a true shuffle in it's early days. How on earth would this be a good idea? The most frustrating thing i've experienced with Spotify besides the music randomly pausing bug that seems to have been resolved. WE WANT A TRUE SHUFFLE. WE WANT TO CHOOSE OUR OWN MUSIC, THAT'S WHY WE PAY. IF WE WANTED YOU TO CHOOSE, WE WOULDN'T PAY!

[Undeterred]

Good luck, $potify don’t give a f··k; they already have your money. Why would they change anything while people keep paying? Why wouldn't they just jack the price? Oh wait, they already have... $POTIFY > ¢ustomers ???

[Mookpsu]

Yup, why address your customers #1 complaint when they still send you money
every month. I'm more than happy to give Amazon Music my money every month
while I listen to repeat free shuffles!

[VentureJD]

How much longer is it going to take to correct this ridiculous shuffle playlist issue?! This should be a very simple fix on your end, but because it's been going on for years, there must be a reason for it. Why not just come clean and tell your loyal subscribers why you won't or can't fix this? Personally, I'll be cancelling my family's premium membership if this isn't corrected in the next few weeks. 

[rozeboosje]

This issue was first reported in 2020. What makes you think there is even the tiniest possibility that this will be resolved "in the next few weeks"? So, what are you delaying the inevitable for?

[VentureJD]

I had some time this afternoon so I got on a chat with Spotify Customer Service about this. She told me to sign out of my account, close the phone app, then sign back in. I did that, then started shuffle playing the same playlist (about 200 songs) that I was getting a lot of repeats on earlier today. Guess what... NO REPEATS! Now granted, I didn't have time to let the songs play all the way through, but listening to a few seconds and then skipping to the next song brought me through the entire playlist in random mode without a single repeat. I'll pay close attention as I listen in the car as normal to see if this really corrected the problem or if it just works when skipping through songs quickly. I'll post the results in a few days. If this works, I can't believe the answer is to just sign out and sign back in! Have any of you tried that? Did it work for you? 

[Slip269]

A few posts back someone mentioned songs were being removed from the liked songs playlist.

I'm currently listening to an Indie recommended playlist which should consist of a chunk of songs from my liked songs and some algorithmic recommended songs, to my surprise 99% of the playlist is in my "liked songs" (or so I thought).  On playing about 75% of the songs which I thought were in my list were no longer showing as liked!.

So added to the fact the shuffle is terrible, now they're removing liked songs, making the chance of hearing something I really want to impossible.

What the **bleep** is going on!

***

To be fair, I don't think it's helping when artists keep remastering/renaming and adding to best of albums etc, I think a good bulk of those songs are reissues without actually stating that.  Which in theory if it's liked twice should stand more of a chance of showing up 😄