[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.

[sadinesu]

Wow, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought I was going crazy thinking the shuffling was terrible. 

[teollo]

You are not alone.
We want to believe

[WibblyWo]

There are a number of 3rd party tools on the web to actually shuffle your playlist and even filter out recently played tracks. Just a shame paying users have to go down this route 😞

[WibblyWo]

We'll never know but the popular wisdom seems to be that Spotify has financial incentives to do it way they they continue to do it. You'd think/hope that some artists would also want their tracks played on a 'level playing field' compared to other artists, but I guess they have even less power than paying users!

But there's nothing new here - it's a bit like the 'magic'/algorithms search engines use to rank results... they do what works for them at the end of the day, and will continue to do so... 

[rozeboosje]

Yeah that (using 3rd party tools) is a hard no from me. When I was a paying customer I expected them to give me the functionality to have my play list shuffled properly. When they refused to act on that simple request I knew it was time to vote with my feet (or, rather, credit card). As I have mentioned before, Amazon Music allows you to randomize your play list. After that the play list persists in that randomized order. Then you can start playing the play list from start to end. Obviously that's not feasible with a play list with a thousand songs or more in it and that is one of Amazon Music's weak points. At the moment I have to take note of the current song when I stop listening and manually navigate back to that song the next day when I want to resume listening. A minor nuisance. But if Spotify introduced the option to save a randomized play list combined with an option to resume it from its current position after stopping I would be back to Premium like (snaps fingers) THAT.

[teollo]

Can you make some examples?

[WibblyWo]

> Can you make some examples?

http://smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com/

https://stevenaleong.com/tools/spotifyplaylistrandomizer

[teollo]

Great!
I knew about "smarter play lists" but it's not clear to me how to use it.
Do you have a template?

[WibblyWo]

More than this is probably too off-topic for this thread

[decker12]

The third party tools work, but they all rely on generating new playlists or modifying existing ones. Funny enough, if you turn on Spotify shuffle on one of those 3rd party shuffled playlists, Spotify will go right ahead and lump all your artists and songs together again. 

It's also not convenient to go screw around with the 3rd party tools when you just want to listen to 3 hours of music in the backyard without hearing the same songs.

The Spotify Playlist stats show over 248,000 Playlists Shuffled since 2016, so we're looking at least 5 years of people complaining about the shuffle play to the point that years ago, someone had to make a 3rd party tool. I'm not trying to bash those tools. The 3rd party tools are great for what they do, but if Spotify cared one bit about this problem, those 3rd party tools wouldn't have needed to exist in the first place.

On another note, it's been oh.. 15 weeks since Mihail asked me to submit some info to help Spotify fix the shuffle algorithm, and I haven't heard a peep back from him or anyone at Spotify. I was going to wish him a Happy New Year but it'll be at least April before he could possibly respond to it, so I didn't bother.