[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.

[ozavraham]

It’s absurd that Spotify still doesn’t have a proper shuffle for playlists. The current shuffle is a joke—repetitive and anything but random. This is a basic feature every music player should have. I’ve canceled my subscription because I’m tired of waiting for this to be fixed and have moved to a service that actually gets it right. Do better.

[zx6dude]

I love this bit of Spotify's ridiculous reply "we've been reading all your comments and feedback which have been incredibly insightful" - Insightful that people are leaving to other providers? Or that people hate Spotify's version of "shuffle"?

Absurd. 

[imperialpint]

Not clear why you bother to post to this thread if you've cancelled your subscription

[rozeboosje]

"Not clear why you bother to post to this thread if you've cancelled your subscription"

Allow me to answer that.

Spotify must die. It's as simple as that. This is not said out of malice, but simply because at this point Spotify has become the dinosaur, the blockage in the way of getting better quality music streaming services. Because of its dominance in the market it is inhibiting the growth of other streaming services that DO take things like keeping their paying listeners happy seriously.

We keep coming back here to tell people that there actually are alternatives to Spotify. Music streaming services like Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music that DO allow you to shuffle your entire playlist so you can listen to all your songs in a fresh new order. We keep coming back here to get more people to move away from the godawful excuse for a platform that's called Spotify.

[zx6dude]

I guess you could also argue that: "Not clear why you bother to post to this thread" if Spotify doesn't bother doing anything about it... 

[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.