[Music] Shuffle by Album

[glassFractals]

Simple enough concept:  Shuffle by albums instead of by tracks, for those of us who prefer full-album listening.

Should function at least within playlists and the play queue.  Perhaps it could also work in radio mode.

[sethmadsen]

Starting to give Apple Music another look... iTunes (an app written almost 20 years ago) had better features including album shuffle and sort album by artist, then by year (allowing you to go through your artists discographies in chronological order). I'm struggling to see how this doesn't have value to Spotify, but clearly to it's users. Perhaps they are just hoping anyone old enough to know what an album is will die off.

Oh the other part of the iTunes feature they got right - when you shuffled something, you could listen to the whole playlist before you'd hear the same thing again... Spotify's shuffle seems to repeat what it wants you to hear.

I love a lot of things about Spotify, don't get me wrong, but to quote Tame Impala, "It feels like we only go backwards".

[Wattoson]

Hey mate, yeah I wasn't sure if apple had any of those features or not. I
used shuttle player and load my own music onto my phone but it's not as
easy as streaming and I guess they're in control of it all cos of that.
I'll give apple music another look. Thanks for the message!

[aprilsnow]

It's already 2021 and we're still begging for this function. As my library grows, more and more I need this feature, so I can shuffle play by Album (a.) in a playlist, (b.) under all saved albums, (c.) under certain artist page. All can be achieved if compares to my iTunes experience, just give user an option to shuffle by song/album/grouping (iTunes feature).

I really love Spotify, also love playlist like discover weekly to discover new music. However, for those who are well aware of their music taste and just want to surprise themselves from their own collection sometimes, I see this is a very basic function.

[llamabutte]

I've given up. Based on it taking four years to get Spotify on the Apple Watch (still no offline) this is never going to happen.

[Wattoson]

Hey mate, yeah I agree with you totally. No album shuffle and the fact that
when an album gets rereleased and it doesn't substitute the original song
in to your liked/playlist songs frustrates me. Unfortunately it's so easy
to use Spotify over my own music it hard to just quit it, I guess that's
why they don't **bleep** about what the customer wants! It's one button
and we pay them. But oh well, it's always nice to complain haha

[Wattoson]

Yeah I agree with you. It interesting how we pay and they progressively
make it worse. Or if not worse, don't seem to care what the paying
customers think. What harm could possibly happen with an album shuffle
button. We don't listen to they algorithm they make for us I guess...

[hairboat]

badly needed!!!

[frippe99]

9 years since first suggested soon. Come on, make it happen. 🙂

[kyrality]

This feels like a feature that would especially bring context to a user's albums etc. when you can cycle through random albums in your collection. If you're aiming to support the metaphor of this feature being akin to a personal collection, it feels like a sorely missing feature. Think of the real life/physical example of just grabbing a CD/tape/record from your collection at random and putting it on.

Also, if you're worried about scale and making sure the pattern works for 'audio' in general that more meta-shuffle of groups (albums, artists, playlists, podcast episodes, downloads, shows), there's no reason why this wouldn't work for that kind of content as well.

[phsshp]

Do you review ideas that are marked, "Not Right Now?"

There's no way to listen to classical music without this feature. I was told, "Put each album in a Playlist." That's just dumb. I want a playlist of a couple hundred favorite albums. I want to shuffle it so I get a randomly selected album but the tracks of the album play in order. Putting each album in a playlist does not help unless we can nest playlists. And it's a lot of unnecessary manual work if nested playlists are available.

Seems like your business overlords have decided you make enough money and don't need to develop further. It's a shame. I hope some other streaming service reads your ideas from 2012-2014 and implements them. I'll be gone in a heartbeat.