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Introducing Smart Shuffle!

Introducing Smart Shuffle!

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 pageIntroductory pageHow the queue will lookHow the queue will look

 

Joan_3-1678291160655.pngElena_1-1678292065514.png

Adding and removing recommendations.

 

 

shuffle.PNG

Different playback options.

 

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.




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I completely agree!!! Now that they’ve taken away the shuffle play button, everyone I try to re-shuffle a playlist because I want to start out on a different song it just pauses the song and I have to I shuffle and reshuffle and hit next song to get a different shuffle mix. Now they’ve made it even worse by making the smart shuffle not optional where it turns on every time you try to h shuffle and reshuffle as a part of that button. Spotify, I really used to like how I could listen to my music and now you’ve made it much harder, especially if I’m in my car trying to start a new playlist all of the sudden it takes like 7-8 taps instead of 3-4 to switch between playlists and have it shuffle play what I want and it has become a driving distraction, even more so since I have tried to use car thing but it refuses to set up on my phone. Seriously considering transferring to a new service even if I have to recreate all of my (quite extensive) playlists 

Please can you give us the option to turn off Smart Shuffle? I hate it.

"Welcome to Spotify customer service. We are robots so please stop bothering us with your questions and complaints because we don't actually care. But first, take some screenshots, then log out and uninstall the app so we can waste even more of your life."

 

The next song is seen hereThis is a recent bug I've encountered with the inclusion of the Smart shuffle feature. One of the things I enjoyed about using the shuffle feature on mobile was that if the shuffle landed on a song I didn't want to listen to, but in an album or EP that I liked, I could just disable the shuffle temporarily, go back or forth a song or two, and re-enable the shuffle no problem. 

For whatever reason, this is no longer possible on mobile. These are the actions that cause the problem:
If I shuffle somewhere into the middle of a playlist, disable the shuffle, and then try to skip to the next song, the playlist jumps to a specific song instead of the next song in the playlist. It's like the app is specifically holding a position it wants to jump to. I've uninstalled/reinstalled the app and the problem persisted.

This is ridiculously frustrating, as navigating a playlist with 3,000+ songs to 'go back' to a song you wished to play is tedious and especially unsafe if using Spotify in the car. 

 

Shuffle sent me to this song, shuffle is disabled before hitting the next track buttonThe next songThe song that plays next. This happens regardless of where I am in the playlist.

I may have thought this was a legit response from them for a second @Pnut91

I want my Enhance button back it was way more simple. It's a clonkly inefficient UX to go to the queue. I liked to know where the music was in the playlist once I add it. 

When I’m offline i can’t turn off shuffle play,  and gives me this error. “Something went wrong”. I think it’s something related to the  “smart shuffle”. 
Any fixes?

 

Plan

Premium

Country

Bolivia

Device

iPhone 14 Pro

Operating System

iOS 16.3.1

 

AD6CBF1F-CEE2-4BC5-B6C8-DA2CAEF8AE70.png

I say we go to twitter and put them on blast about how much we hate the smart shuffle feature. I went to message them on twitter and they were absolutely useless. Twitter is @SpotifyCares

please remove this feature it sucks. Or give the option to disable it. Sometimes I like to quickly reshuffle the queue until there is a few songs I like. It’s insanely inconvenient having to wait for the smart shuffle to add and then take the songs off. And if I have my playlist set to a specific genre and the smart shuffle comes on and off it completely disregards the genre selection and plays all my music. So dumb please fix the app.

The smart shuffle is a neat idea but it has a disastrous flaw when connected to Spotify's "Car Thing." When I am driving on the road and I want to reshuffle my songs sometimes I'll do it through the app. Usually I'll just tap it to turn shuffle off and then press it again to reshuffle super quickly. Now there is a problem where I have to wait to let it load smart shuffle songs and then proceed with turning off and back on, which I might add is something I dont want to do on the road. The bigger problem is that when connected to Car Thing and I turn smart shuffle off, it'll automatically skip the currently playing song without even needing to press the "next track" button. If there was a way to disable smart shuffle or even make it a hold prompt on the shuffle button, that would be better. The hold prompt idea would go something like this: if you tap shuffle, you would go between shuffle on and shuffle off but if you held your finger over the shuffle button, smart shuffle could be activated. 

I really dislike this new feature. There has been multiple times where I have wanted to turn off regular shuffle to listen to songs from the same artists, and when I do Smart Shuffle comes on automatically. And when I click it again to turn off all shuffle modes, I still get shuffled to either other song that are not in the order that I have on my playlist, but also get songs that are not on the playlist all together. The only way to bypass this is to make sure that all shuffle modes are off and then scroll all the way down to pick a song from the same artist that I want to listen, witch is a real pain to do constantly. I’m not asking to take it away completely, just to give an option to permanently deactivate Smart Shuffle for the people that don’t want to use it indefinitely. It has made my experience with Spotify very annoying for the past weeks, and it had made me want to cancel my subscription a few times already.

Adding my name to the 'rethink this please' list

 

Wouldn't be so bad if you can immediately toggle it off but it takes a couple seconds to do the recommendation before you can toggle it back off

 

Just inconvenient as fk. Put a toggle in settings and let people decide..?

This update is horrible. I understand that smart shuffle is a great idea, but not being able to turn it off is horrible. I don’t want any recommendations, I just want to listen to my music man

What I would like to see is the possibility of the minus in one image to also have a plus, which directly adds the song to the playlist, which was added by the app. Hiding is feasible with the minus, but the addition of detours. in addition, I would like that in the view of the playlist when I check a title, also the direct addition to the supplemented playlist is possible. it would also be nice if I could kick from this view a song that I no longer want to have in it, directly from the playlist.

Please please turn off smart shuffle, there's nothing smart about it. It populates my playlist with tracks I neither like or would listen to.

It's is so annoying. Let's face it, if I wanted these tracks, I'd have added them myself

I cannot turn it off, maybe amazon prime music is a better option. Its spoiling my playlists

10 pages later, I'm glad to see that the (well-deserved) roasting continues. I hope whoever thought forcing this through was a good idea feels stupid now.

 

This feature is so comically, objectively bad I literally made my first post here to complain about it after being quietly subscribed to Premium for the last 8, 9? years. It's that bad and therefore whoever rammed it into the app should feel that dumb.

I, like a few people who have posted already, made an account just so I could complain about smart shuffle. Well, it's not smart shuffle itself, it's the way it was implemented that makes no sense to me. You want a feature that adds songs to a playlist that you think the listener will like? That's fine, but isn't that exactly what the "Enhance" feature already did? Why did this need to get rolled into the shuffle button? Why are the suggested songs added to the queue but not shown in the playlist? Why does the list of recommended songs at the bottom of the playlist disappear when smart shuffle is turned on?

 

What problems does any of this solve? I can't think of a single way in which this improved the UX, or how it added any functionality.

 

Also, I'm not sure if this is related, but I see that going to a radio station based on a playlist is no longer an option. Playlist Radio has been my favorite way to discover new music for years. If its removal is related to the addition of smart shuffle, again I have to ask why? 

 

Hey @TheGreatGibby

 

I believe the removal of Playlist Radio and the addition of Smart Shuffle are related, or at least similar. Both changes are mentioned in this post about the removal of Playlist Radio.

Please leave any feedback you have about Playlist Radio within the thread I linked above.

 

 

 

 

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Why isn't this on desktop also? I really like this feature but I use my desktop far more than I'm on my phone and it's really annoying to have to get the music with smart shuffle on playing on my phone first and then trying to switch it to my desktop without smart shuffle disabling.

DELETE THIS FEATURE! No-one asked for it, no one wants it. Not everything has to be curated by an algorithm that’s designed to maximise profits for stakeholders. 

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