[Following] Shuffle Songs from followed Artists

[guimenga]

This feature has already been suggested a few times since 2014 (maybe even before that)! 
It's a feature on iTunes since when Britney Spears was a hit (the first time)!
Winamp did it way before that (remember Winamp!?). 

It's 2018… Almost 19 and we're still unable to play songs from every artist we follow in shuffle. I don't want to (and can't even) save every song from every artist on a playlist. Who'd do that?! 

It seems like such a small thing to implement that not doing it seems almost lazy.
I KNOW you aren't lazy. Pleaaaaaase don't let me dooooown!
Thanks 🙂 

[mnearents]

Thanks for the feedback. Curious how you would see this being automated. Walk me through what you’re expecting in terms of how it would know what albums to select. 

or would it be good enough that it lists all albums by your followed artists and gives you a simple one click way to select them?

[Darth_GTB]

mnearents, the issue with Spotify right now is that it works based on playlists. What we need is a way to just run everything regardless of playlist, like we used to do when we used to own the media. This suggestion doesn't have any regard to albums. It only takes the artist into consideration.

When I first got into Spotify, I added most of the artists I wanted to listen to and then when I went to listen to it, there was no way to listen to anything lol I was forced to like the first 10 or so songs that show up on the artist page for each artist or else I would be stuck at listening to one artist at a time. Why do we even add artists then if we can't play them on shuffle? It's still a pain to this day. After years listening to Spotify, I was able to like 2.5k songs, by playing the weekly mix and release radar every Monday and liking song by song as they show up and many of them aren't even from my liked artists! If we could just shuffle all liked artists, there would be immediately over 10k songs to shuffle and I wouldn't have to manually like 200 songs every time I know of a new band!

[Marrian]

well, I dont have much time to write here. 
quick chat with ai suggested that I should be able to program a solution to our problem. 
Playlist limit should be 10k so... I ll let you know when I have SHUFFLE EVERYTHING playlist ready :d 

[mnearents]

@Darth_GTB I get what you're saying. Without Spotify making this a feature, I am limited to using the web API, which means I am limited to creating playlists for you unfortunately.

I am going to look into the API to see if there's a way I can generate an artist shuffle (in Spotify a playlist) from all your followed artists. But honestly, anytime you found a new artist, you'd still have to edit the shuffle. If the feature was valuable enough for you, maybe I could implement a paid subscription tier that did a daily query for any newly followed artists and automatically added their library to your shuffle. I say paid subscription because this would be expensive for me to implement. And Spotify has a 10,000 track limit, so some people would hit that and then need a new shuffle.

For me, I don't want a shuffle of all my followed artists. The music varies too much. Currently I have a shuffle of all the Metalcore artists I like, another shuffle of all the 2000s nu-metal bands I liked, and then a synthwave playlist that isn't a shuffle.  I wonder if most people listen to enough of a variety that they'd want more separation like that. I think this is more of the target audience I'm going for. Someone who doesn't mind going in a tweaking and configuring. Maybe you want a workout shuffle, or a roadtrip shuffle, or a background music while you work shuffle, etc.

The point of my app was not so much to remove all effort, it was more to help keep your playlists fresh by "reshuffling" them once you've listened through. This is why currently when you create a shuffle, it only chooses one song per artist and creates a playlist. When you reshuffle, it selects all new songs. 

But again, I'll look into generating shuffles using all of an artists tracks, or maybe let you select up to 10 of their tracks.

I could also look into a feature that checks your followed artists and automatically "likes" all their songs for you. I know the web api can do this: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/save-tracks-user

Any other thoughts and ideas welcome. And again, if you want to give input or be notified when the app is available, fill this out: https://forms.gle/ntFr27Dq9sz3tXHm7

[Darth_GTB]

Hello, mnearents. Sorry, I think I misunderstood your previous message. I didn't see you were replying to another person. I thought you were replying to the OP. I didn't know you were developing a parallel app by using their API. My message was regarding the suggestion given to Spotify proper and nothing to do with your previous conversation. You can completely ignore my message in that case. Spotify proper should make a few changes to make this less frustrating.

Regarding the music variation and how I organise my music, the easy answer in my case is "I don't have time for this". I just can't simply add song by song to multiple playlists. I'll never spend hours adding songs to playlists, so I only have one playlist, which is the liked songs playlist. If I could just simply play all artists without a playlist, that would help a lot. It's how I used to listen to music back when we still used to have all the media stored locally. The only separation I used to do was to create folders for the country of origin of each artist, but that wouldn't affect how the music was shuffled. So yes, I expect having very different songs playing one after the other because all genres are together.

[DarienBarbarian]

• 3 years later and Spotify STILL hasn't done a damn thing about this

[DarienBarbarian]

I have almost 4000 artists that I follow, I have over a dozen TB music downloaded and ripped from CDs on my laptop. I can't Lauren and haul my laptop around with me everywhere to hear the music I like. It's been almost 10 years since this shuffle artists idea had been suggested to Spotify but they claim in 2021 to be looking into this feature since it's received enough votes that it's something people want(I think they need 200, but there's over 500). They still continue to be lazy, not listen to their listeners and customers and not implement this feature. There have been a couple comments from people that have made theory own software that can do this, only one was working but has since been unavailable. There's plans for a new one but I haven't seen it yet. They said it should be available first week of Sept 2024.please let us know the status and update on this. 

[mnearents]

@DarienBarbarian Yeah, I am building something right now, but it can't solve your problem. Playlist size limit is 10k songs, so to shuffle all the songs from 4k artists would be way over that.

If you're okay having 1 random song from each artist and then periodically "reshuffling" it to pick a different song, then it could be usable for you. Or if you're able to somehow break that list down into smaller chunks or genres and create separate shuffles, that might work.

Or I could add a feature that lets you create the shuffle with all songs from all artists you follow and it automatically chunks it up into 10k song playlists until they're all added. YOu'd probably end up with like 10-20 playlists though with that many artists.

[DarienBarbarian]

That's fine with me, I can always reshuffle as long as it includes all my artists eventually. I don't listen that long to go thru 10K in one sitting anyway. I also think there needs to be an option to view all your artists, I'm not sure if that's already a feature, I haven't seen it. I think I might've seen it on my ps4 long time ago when I use the app there but I haven't since I bought a ps5. And maybe I can then select the artists I want to shuffle??

Any idea when you might have this available for use?? 

[kottrobot]

I want to be able to shuffle all songs by artists that i have in my library. It would be great if there was a way to generate souch a playlist automaticly or if there was a pinned funktion to just play random songs from your library without a playlist.