[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.

[random_please]

I saw in another thread the following statement from Spotify - This is probably when they broke the random option good and proper. They were trying to fix the same song playing immediately or soon after it was played. I guess this could happen more often on smaller playlists. 

Updated: 2016-02-05

Hey folks, we have made some improvements to our shuffle algorithm that we are turning on as a default for all users. We'd love your feedback on how your shuffle experience changes after today (Feb 5, 2016). Thanks for your feedback, your comments are essential to helping us improve Spotify. 

All we can do it point people to this thread to upvote the issue...

@Spotify - Why is this issue not classed as a bug and fixed ASAP. It's such a shame looking through my 1000+ song playlist and seeing songs that don't play any more and other songs I want to remove because I hear them so often.

[Mookpsu]

It's not a developer glitch on their end, it's a business decision. Right
now I'm listening to a custom playlist on Amazon Music that will not repeat
any songs so the technology does in fact exist. I have zero regrets about
cancelling Spotify, I also made a business decision

[zx6dude]

If they broke it in 2016, that just confirms that they have no intention of fixing it any time soon. Or ever.

It just shows you what type of company Spotify is. Greed over customer service. 

[rozeboosje]

"I guess this could happen more often on smaller playlists"

No. The problem is particularly bad on LARGE playlists. If you have a playlist with over 1,000 songs in it you keep hearing songs from the same tiny subset of a couple of dozen songs over and over again, and songs from the rest of the playlist almost never.

As others have already pointed out, it is SO bad that there MUST be a business decision behind it. You may consider yourself a "paying customer" with your Premium subscription but in their business model that involves huge sums of money through contracts with various record labels and artists your paltry handful of Euros, Dollars or whatever you pay them every month is piddles and they don't care about making you happy if it runs the risk of making (say) Sony or Adele unhappy. If there is a conflict of interest between you and them, guess who will get thrown under the bus EVERY SINGLE TIME?

ON TOP OF THAT there ALSO is a technical reason. Even if their algorithm were completely unbiased toward their biggest business partners and designed to not favour some artists over others, at the root of it it works off an 80 song "play queue" and I illustrated a long time ago in this very thread through a mockup for which I left a GITHUB link, oh, I don't know, 100 pages ago (?) that even with a perfectly honest randomizer in a 1,000 song playlist if you work off an 80 song play queue you'll start hearing repeats within the first 100 or so songs which means you'll hear songs for a second time when you haven't heard some 900 songs out of the playlist at all yet.

So yes, their algorithm is fatally flawed. Partially because it's moronic as a basic concept, but mostly because they're kotowing to players with very deep pockets and your Premium subscription is peanuts to them.

My suggestion: do what I and many others did. If a proper shuffle is important to you, move to a provider whose paid subscription includes a properly working shuffle because Spotify does not and never will have one.

[gu_-tqdjarlb9]

PLEASE

[rozeboosje]

NO

[random_please]

When I said "I guess this could happen more often on smaller playlists" I was referring to the state of the shuffle back in 2016 prior to applying the current algorithm. I.E it was probably more like a role of dice selection - all songs in the playlist had the same chance of being played each time meaning songs could be heard 2 times in a row or very close to each other - there would be more of a chance of this occurring in smaller playlist. I think it was this issue that caused them to create the current algorithm. 

I wondering what's the best way to pressure Spotify into changing it. I don't think they really know how many people don't like it. The up votes on the shuffle issues are pretty low.

I have started commenting on some YouTube pages discussing this subject to UpVote the issue here - But you have to keep the comment brief as it gets removed otherwise.

I think we all need to try and get people to UpVote the issue by telling them how to do it via this website.

[rozeboosje]

For your own sanity I suggest you give up on trying to put pressure on Spotify. They don't care, that's obvious. Take your money and spend it on a provider that DOES shuffle playlists correctly. There is no reason why you couldn't still enjoy a free version of Spotify as well, and put up with the ads and other nuisances when you do, but stop spending money on a provider to whom you're at the bottom of the pile when it comes to keeping their customers happy.

[random_please]

I think the chance of hearing repeats is not a big deal (especially on large playlists). But Spotify is targeting songs to play under the current method - they have admitted this. When a song is targeted it then has a high chance of being targeted next time. This is how you get to the current situation where some songs are heard many times (to the point you want to delete them) and other songs are never or hardly ever heard.

[dank13]

I can't believe this is actually still a problem:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Implement-an-actual-shuffle-function/idi-p/27607
Yesterday, I had a 5-hour car trip, and out of my 1793-song playlist, I heard the same songs twice.

I felt like it was shuffling only 30-odd songs on my playlist.
It's hard to understand how you can shuffle a thousand songs and still listen to the same song before all the rest of the 999 songs have played. How hard is it to do that?

Is Spotify getting paid by big record labels to play their songs???