[Playlists] Ability to link together Tracks in Playlists

[bvacaliuc]

Hi,

Wouldn't it be great if you could "pair"/"link"/"lock" or "chain" tracks together in a playlist? Then even if you shuffle-played, certain songs would always play together.

mock-up of how linking/pairing a song might work.

This idea was actually started by @Sartoris in 2012:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Ability-to-link-together-tracks-in-playlists-also-for-...

But in 2015 it was closed as not having enough votes. Coincidentally, about the same time, I signed up for Spotify premium.  As I listened to all the songs I've "liked" with shuffle, the one thing that kept coming into my mind was the terrible feeling you get when a song that is meant to follow another is not played.  You get the feeling of being violated; it is a terrible experience.  As I searched for this feature, I saw that idea was marked inactive and decided to open it again.

That idea had gotten 138 likes in 2015 and as of January 2020 has gotten another 116 for a total of 255.  There were another 18 ideas then that all linked to the one above (see attached). So I re-submitted this idea in 2015 and since then you wonderful people have given it over 880 votes! Thank you!

From the rules, we see that we needed to have over 500 votes to keep the topic alive in monthly discussions (check!). We also see that we need 100 votes per year to keep it alive (check again!). So we're in good shape on that front. Now we have to see what we need to do to get it moving forward from "Not Right Now" to "Under Consideration".

Again, from the rules above, Spotify says that they use these criteria:

• Helping artists.
• Data and other information we've collected.
• Information from research testing, focus groups, and surveys.
• Feedback in the Community and other support channels. (That's us!)
• Our overall short- and long-term business strategy.

Hmm. Ok. So I would say that playing tracks that are meant to be together really helps the artists because their work is rendered in the correct way that they intended. I'm wondering how many artists are dying inside when their specially arranged songs are cut up because someone shuffled their playlist?

I can't speak to Spotify's data and research, focus groups and surveys, or about their business strategy. However, it occurs to me that anything that affects the order of which song plays can affect revenue because Spotify pays someone when a song gets played and they don't pay the same amount of $ for every song... Sure its a tiny fraction of a cent, but it adds up. So my first guess is that Spotify's hesitation to implement this idea is economic. I think we should continue the discussion along these lines to see if we could come up with some kind of consensus on this notion.

Letting a song "pair" with another in a playlist would be enough to make a lot of people happy.  Would we be willing to put some $ behind having this feature? Lets say Spotify charged you $0.01 (a cent) everytime you were shuffle playing and the queue hit a linked song and played the one that came after it. Would you be ok with that? If not, what would make it ok? I think answering the economic question is one thing that is keeping this idea from moving forward. @wsmyth commented in May 2019 that he would be willing to spend $1/month for this feature. I would do that too, would you?

From the many, many great comments, @WesleyM77 posted in April 2019 a link to a US Patent. There are two patents, actually, [US8214740B2] and [US9396760B2]. Reading through the two patents, it's clear that they cover this idea in many of its possible methods. So apart from the economic impact, Spotify may be prevented by the patent holder from implementing this feature. It has been noted that only one service has this feature, and now this explains it. The patents expire in 2030.

So, here we are. We want a feature, someone has successfully patented the feature and so we can't have nice things. Everyone including the patent holders want to make money, so is there a price that Spotify could negotiate with the patent holder and then pass on to the users that would be acceptable to all parties?

Spotify, would you look into this and get back to us?

Thanks very much!

-bogdan

[Madbulli]

Linking songs in playlists is a must.

It is sacrilege to not hear Evie 1, 2 and 3 by Stevie Wright in that order.

Make it happen Spotify please.

[PaccPacc21]

I would like to pair songs that are set up on the album to be played in a row. Some songs on an album go from one song into the next, as if it is one song. So if shuffling a playlist, the 2 songs would be grouped as 1 song and play in a row. Is this possible?

[exSpectacularrr]

I really hate the way Spotify tests, administers, ignores, adds, and retracts features and feature requests.

For instance, for years, they made it next to impossible to see which tracks were downloaded to your device. Then they added that feature for a while. Then they took it away again. Now it’s back in some different form.

Or the time they had a horrible Roku app. And then had no Roku app for more than a year. And now we have some differently crappy Roku app. wth!!?! 🤬 

So any time I think I’m enjoying Spotify, if I want to get so irritated that I start looking into shifting my premium subscription to some other vendor, all I have to do is think of a feature we’ve been asking for, for years, or come over here to the community posts, and sure enough, it kills 100% of my enthusiasm and puts me back on the track of researching alternatives. 

Spotify, why do you insist on being so opaque, mercurial, and UX-incompetent? I think it’s time to copy and paste this into whatever I last left as my 2-star review in the Apple App Store. 

[Nitwon]

I like shuffle, but some tracks should always play together.

Scenario: Sometimes I add two or three tracks from an album to a playlist which are best played in order, because each track transitions nicely into the next (or sometimes for other reasons).

Problem: Turning on shuffle mode will not play these tracks together.

Solution: Ability to link a few tracks together so that, in a large playlist with shuffle mode switched on, they always play as a sequence. In other words, shuffle mode treats these tracks as just one track in the playlist.

[Luan]

Updated on 2021-08-31

Hello!

Your idea has been submitted a while ago but unfortunately hasn't gathered enough kudos yet. In order to keep an overview of the active ideas in this forum, we will close this idea for now. However, this does not mean that your idea has been declined by Spotify.

If you still feel strongly about your request, we encourage you to continue sharing it to get more kudos. Folks can still add their votes and comments in order to support it.

Do you have any further questions on how the idea exchange is managed? Just click here.

[garys]

I love to make large playlists and listen to them in shuffle mode, but there are so many tracks that NEED to be played together and in a certain order, either because that's the way the radio stations always presented them to us, or because the tracks fade into each other and just don't sound right when they start or end without without being adjoined to their companion track.  There are some great examples in the previous posts, so I'm not going to add more.

It seems like it would be a simple thing to implement- Just let users have playlists in folders so they can place the songs in the folder in the order they want to hear those tracks.  When in shuffle mode, the users playlist would shuffle the tracks NOT in the folder, but when the folder comes up as the current track, the songs inside it would play in the order placed then the playlist would continue shuffling until the next folder comes up.

Honestly, I think the record companies could've avoided this problem when they started making CD's by not splitting the songs that were so obviously meant to be played together.  This is a chance for Spotify to help their users fix what what the record companies **bleep** up.

[MrTSquared]

All,

This is a fundamentally basic idea that should be easy to implement if the coding was done in a reasonable manner. Many of these groupings should be automatic anyway. There are many examples in Classic Rock where it just does not make sense to split songs up. Currently, in shuffle mode, this makes listening less than desirable.

Here are some high level technical ideas of how to implement this:

- Allow a song to link to another song. When you play the song, see if there is something linked to it. If there is or if it linked to something, play the head of the linked list. This fundamentally becomes a "doubly linked list" of songs where you can go backwards and forwards.  This would be two fields added to a Song object. From here, you just need a quick and dirty function to check if the link fields are null or not.

- Create a mini or "light" playlist. This could contain a group of songs that always get played together. This could be a type of Song object so it behaves like a song but internally has a list of songs that will be played, The Song "name" displays list of songs separated by slashes or dashes when you ask for Song.name.

Idea 2 is probably a bit cleaner but would take longer to implement.  That said, either of these ideas should be easy to implement if the code is clean and object oriented. I would be happy to donate some pro bono consulting time to help architect this solution. Getting the basics down should take less than half an hour to implement...that's the part I'm finding annoying. All in tested?, we're probably talking a few hours total. 

You should at least have someone manually go through songs and make sure the obvious ones are tied together as one song (Classical song moments, Pink Floyd's the Wall, Heartbreaker/Living, Loving Maid (Led Zep), ...). We are paying for a service. Please put our money to providing some basic, expected features. This definitely falls in that category. 

Thanks,

Tony T^2

[rlbaum3]

My idea is to add an ability to link/group songs together in a playlist so they always play next to each other. My main motivation behind this is because then you can have songs that have a separate intro that then play seamlessly in a playlist on shuffle; [intro + song] -> ???. Or maybe you just always want to hear a couple songs in the true album order among a bunch of other songs you love. Who knows?! I think it would be nice though. 

[Alex]

Updated on 2021-09-25

Hello @rlbaum3,

Thanks for submitting your idea to the Idea Exchange!

We've gone ahead and marked this as a new suggestion. Spotify Staff will look into this idea once it reaches the necessary amount of votes.

More info on how your feedback reaches Spotify via the Idea Exchange can be found here.

Cheers!

[Bodhisattvas]

Apple has had this for over a decade. Easy enough to do here (see MrTSquared’s comment above).