Introducing Smart Shuffle!

[Joan]

Introducing Smart Shuffle! 

We know that our users love creating their own playlists to capture key moments in time – in fact, playlists created by users often become their most-streamed playlist for the first several months but listening to these playlists slowly fades overtime, and users are eager to discover new music.

With this in mind, we’re excited to launch a new play mode called Smart Shuffle that keeps listening sessions fresh and provides personalized recommendations that perfectly match any listeners’ playlist vibe. 

This update will roll out to Premium users on mobile devices starting today.

How does Smart Shuffle work?

• You can use it in any playlist created by you, and your Liked Songs.
• To activate it, just use the Shuffle button to switch between regular play, Shuffle mode and Smart Shuffle.
• When Smart Shuffle is on, recommendations are added to your session automatically. You can find all the recommendations sitting in your queue.
• You will be able to recognize the music we are recommending with the sparkle (✨) symbol next to the track. For a playlist with more than 15 songs, we’ll recommend one song for every three tracks.
• And the best part, your original playlist remains untouched, so you can add any new track that catches your ear.
• If you like a specific recommendation, just save it using the plus button in the Now Playing View. If that song doesn’t hit right, just tap the minus to remove it from the recommendations. This is then used to better adjust the suggestions we put forward.
• Every time you turn Smart Shuffle off, a new mix will be available every time you activate it again.

Introductory pageHow the queue will look

Adding and removing recommendations.

FAQ

What about the Enhance feature?

For now, Smart Shuffle will replace the Enhance feature.

What will happen to Discover Weekly and other regularly updated playlists?

For the time being, no changes to those will be made. Smart Shuffle aims to improve the listening experience for user curated playlists.

Does this mean that using Smart Shuffle will cause my carefully curated playlists to get cluttered with new recommendations?

No! Your original playlist remains untouched, so you can add any new track that catches your ear. Smart Shuffle won’t change your playlist without your explicit permission. What changes instead is what you'll hear during each specific listening session

We hope you're as excited as we are about this new play mode. The official Newsroom announcement is out, you can check that out too. For any and all feedback on the matter you may have, you're more than welcome to comment in the thread below.

[Isaac951]

Exactly it was the best way to build my playlist also while finding new music it recommended. Now its all messed up 🥺

[jackmmccarty]

I almost always listen to music via my Liked Songs playlist. When I listen on shuffle, if I come across a song where I knew that there was another song nearby in the playlist that I want to listen to (ie if I came across a song I saved in 2018, it would be near other songs I saved in 2018), I turn off shuffle and the queue goes back to non-shuffle and I simply skip to the nearby song I want. 

Now with the addition of smart shuffle, I am no longer able to do this. Somehow, in the process of turning shuffle off in which I have to first go through smart shuffle, the queue doesn’t reflect where in the library the current song is. 

Therefore it would be nice to add a setting in the playback settings menu to turn smart shuffle off. 

[WarningHPB]

absolutely trash feature just give me shuffle on and off, and a separate toggle for suggestions.

a suggestion, if people wanted to test your new "features" you should let them opt in and leave those that don't want to

[hoodiedeer]

PLEASE add a feature to PERMANENTLY DISABLE smart shuffle. It keeps coming back on after I've already had to go out of my way to opt out and I don't ever want it on. I already bought Premium AND disabled autoplay in settings just because I was sick of spotify forcing music I didn't choose to hear down my throat. If this feature is going to be forced on us then I don't see why I should continue my spotify subscription, this is ridiculous.

[OwenP]

This sucks compared to enhance playlist. Please bring that back.

[rossp91]

Hi there,

Enhanced was so much better. Smart Shuffle made what should be a simple function button into something more annoying.

Plus, if you're on the tube/subway and the signal is spotty, the Smart Shuffle makes it impossible to use as the waiting animation doesn't turn off. Please at least allow us to turn off Smart Shuffle in the options.

[StarNeet]

Is there a way to toggle enhance, why was the feature removed instead of adding options?
Its shuffling through songs I already added in the playlist playing them again, with new ones at random intervals. with enhance i could've seen what was added and listen to them directly instead of skipping through every song...the removal made things unnecessarily tedious 

[hznsnabz]

enhance and smart shuffle seem to do essentially the same thing, except smart shuffle is MUCH worse. for one thing making it the same button as the shuffle button makes it kind of a pain to go between shuffle and regular play because my playlists are hours long. for another it make it way harder to see the recommended songs and if you lose the queue you lose the recommendations and i always forget the names.

there are other issues but you get the gist. i loved the enhance feature it made it really easy to find new songs, they would match the playlist really well, and i’ve found so many artists that way. because smart shuffle is so much more painful to interact with, i just don’t even use it, and it’s the same damn feature. so can you please give me enhance back, or a way to remove smart shuffle (not remove the recommendations, remove the setting). 

it’s honestly impressive the lengths developers seem to go to to just make their app worse (sorry i meant the business team, i assume the developers actually use the app, when whoever made this change clearly never used it). 

[Fred_matt1]

I literally could not agree more!!! The enhance feature was so much better, smart shuffle is just painful to use. Why did they ever change it?

[Fred_matt1]

This could not be more true! They really over complicated it.

[Fred_matt1]

Agreed!!

[Xionne_]

To the User Experience designers and other product members at Spotify,

I am extremely disappointed with the Smart Shuffle feature that has replaced the Enhance feature on Spotify's playlists. Smart Shuffle is the worst playlist feature I have ever encountered on any music player or audio streaming app. It has made managing my playlists and adding recommended songs a nightmare.

I am unable to easily tell which songs in my playlist have been recommended by Spotify, which is particularly frustrating when I have a large playlist with numerous manually added songs. Additionally, the process of adding a recommended song now requires multiple clicks, which is far less efficient than the previous one-click process.

Moreover, turning the Smart Shuffle mode on is a hassle, requiring multiple clicks to switch from Shuffle off to Shuffle on to Smart Shuffle. In contrast, the Enhance mode was simple and easy to use with just a single click.

I urge Spotify to bring back the Enhance feature and revert the Smart Shuffle feature to its previous state. As a loyal user of your platform, I hope you take my feedback into consideration and make the necessary changes to improve the user experience. Thank you.

[Aiden84]

I know this is an old post but can there be a way to disable the enhanced shuffle when I’m trying to shuffle from the bottom left on the song pop up? It’s extremely annoying when I just want to reshuffle my playlist. It doesn’t even give me an option 

[ChayD]

Good idea for some, but for the rest of us, this is pretty much like going into a burger joint and asking for a plain burger, then the server goes "yOu lIke cHeEsE dOn'T yOu? hErE, tRy sOmE cHeEsE, yOu mIgHt lIkE iT!!! hOw aBoUt mAyO?? iLl pUt sOmE oN,  yOu nEvEr kNoW!!!!! mAyBe tHroW a fEw pIcKleS oN tHeRe fOr gOoD mEaSuRe -  eVeRyBoDy LOVES pIcKlEs!!!!!" and before you know it, you have paid for a burger that's inedible. I think that's a reasonable analogy.

[Gabriel-Elizabeth]

I hate that mine always goes into smart shuffle everytime I open the app. I want to choose when I hear new music and I preferred enhance for my playlist when I really wanted something new. I do not like smart shuffle and it seems like not a lot of people do. I don't normally comment but this feature bothers me that much.

[AnnaBowey]

Neat 😀 Now delete it so I never have to see it again.

Leave the shuffle button as is. Double tapping is a handy way to reshuffle, and now brings up a feature that I neither asked for, nor use, and it needs some loading time so I can't triple tap it away. Horrid placement

[HGRitticuss]

Like the rest before me has stated, it's not a fix. I didn't ASK for for all my playlists now to be on shuffle. Annoyed, again that Spotify just turns **bleep** on without any acknowledgement from the consumer who is PAYING!

[ArinBlackheart]

No, it's completely broken and support won't help

[marstaik]

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Device

(iPhone 8, Samsung Galaxy 9, Macbook Pro late 2016)

Operating System

(iOS 10, Android Oreo, Windows 10,etc.)

My Question or Issue

[Tas13]

I absolutely **bleep**ing hate smart shuffle jesus christ  I could be listening on regular shuffle and want to turn that off, and then it cycles through to smart shuffle and takes ten **bleep**ing years to load smart shuffle, I don't even want smart shuffle so I have to wait until it's done to go back into normal listening, please make an option to complete disable it in settings