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[All Platforms] Option to have a true shuffle

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.

Updated on 2024-05-01

Hello everyone, 

 

Thank you for your continued engagement and valuable feedback on this idea. 

 

I'm afraid there hasn't been any change on the status of this idea since our last update. However, we've been reading all your comments and feedback which have been incredibly insightful. 

 

We’ll keep you folks posted as soon as we have any new info to share.

Comments
rozeboosje

Meanwhile, back at Amazon Music... one thing that hadn't been available were the albums "It's a beautiful day" and "Marrying Maiden" by "It's a beatiful day"

 

Well that's fixed now.

pyromaniacrob

Spotify will not enable a true shuffle because it is in their financial interest not to do so. Their "shuffle" algorithm can prioritize songs that are cheaper per play. I'm sure they've done the math and they lose less money from people switching platforms due to this issue than they would by allowing true shuffle.

 

Technically, this is a very simple implementation, so there is no other reason for them to not to have enabled this widely requested feature. They remain silent on the issue because "we make more money by not implementing this" would upset people more than ignoring the issue.

Mookpsu
Pyromaniacrob you are 1000% correct. This is clearly a calculated business
decision on their part which is why I made the calculated business decision
to move on from them.
imperialpint

Odd that so many of the comments above seem to come from people (or person?) who have abandoned Spotify.  Difficult to understand why they keep commenting on this issue.

That said, i think the problem is slightly more technically difficult than you might guess.  I believe the issue centers on reshuffling the songs using a different random key, while lowering the probability of selection for each song according to their recent 'spins'.  effectively, if the shuffle uses the exact same shuffle methodology each time there's no reason why the shuffled list would not be in the same order each time, assuming the "first" 80% or 90% f the list remains unchanged. 

I've discovered that deleting songs from the list has dramatically changed the shuffle and I'm now hearing songs on the list I haven't heard in ages.  Of course, i wouldn't have the songs on the list if i didn't want them there so I've been recently deleting repeating songs and then immediately adding them back.  this takes them out of the fixed random repeat order  but puts them back in a completely different spot in the list. the song is assigned a new index number and changes the index numbers of the whole list, effectively adding another level of randomization to the list. 

dank13

As a developer, I can tell you it's not a hard thing to do, so there must be other reasons why they one do it. Most likely because they get paid by record labels or something like that.

 

For what I can see. The way their shuffle works is like this:

they create a a mini playlist of random songs from your playlist (75 songs to be exact). And as the songs play, they keep adding random songs from your playlists to the bottom of the mini playlist. But those random songs are taken from your entire playlist, no matter if they have just played or not, that's why there is a great chance of you listening to the same song 2x.

Now, why they do it like this, I can't explain. Why they can't just shuffle your entire playlist into a

 new order and play that order from top to bottom is hard to understand. Specially when it takes less than 5 lines of code to do it.

 

sbfeinstein

Hello, I'd like to ask not that spotify implement an actual shuffle feature but instead please just answer a question:  why won't you implement a random shuffle?  If it is for business / financial reasons, could you please state that plainly so the community can help with a solution?  What are the economics of making it work (i.e. if I pay an extra $1 / month would that offset whatever this means financially to Spotify?)

dank13

you guys want to know the funniest thing? This arvo I took on the challenge to develop my own shuffle player app for iPhone, and after 2hrs I have a working prototype, in no way it's any close to being ready for production, but I can connect to my spotify account, display all my playlists, go into a playlist, shuffle and play every song on it, I can even control how the shuffle works in settings creating custom shuffle modes.

And that only in 2hrs. So YES it is possible to do a true shuffle of songs, Spotify is just absolute dks that don't care about their users period.

stevemcgowan1954
Sounds good.
marcdeye
launch it!

Anatosuchus

It's absurd that "shuffle" doesn't mean "shuffle". And this from at least four years ago!