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.

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.

[strerd]

I've blocked 4bats from playing. Lo & behold it's back in my list. 

I've got an ever growing list of artists I've blocked. For f** sakes disable Smart Shuffle. I've got over 5000 songs in my playlist. Your reccomendations are poor. 

You have a separate page for artists I may like called Search.

[zpoigjdaf]

Please create an option to disable smart shuffle. This feature is absolutely trash and it ruins my experience of using Spotify. 

[LIAMWILSON0]

BRING BACK ENHANCE

[Luckimandi]

Wow… well this is disappointing. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to disable this and came here. Skipped to the 58th page thinking at the end and 2 years later there would be a solution but nope.

Having said that when I am listening to my playlists I don’t want your suggestions. I have the songs on my playlists that I want. And while some people may like Nickelback I do not nor is ANYTHING on my playlists like Nickelback except it has guitars. Not to mention your stupid suggestions play 3 suggestions for every one of my songs. I don’t pay you to suggest **bleep** music. Thanks but no thanks.

[j-e]

this was a nice try at first!

But now you should rename it "smart sponsored content" as it's got really bad recently i"m getting "junk" into my playlist.

Your algorithm is great and know how to suggest great content, stop poluting our music experience with inappropriate sponsored recommandation.

AND Please let's us disable it once for all!

[SQueRTLe]

But I have another question, the smart shuffle button hasn’t been working for a week. I can’t add similar songs to a playlist, help, why did this function disappear??? how do I turn it back on? I have already updated and deleted and cleared the cache, nothing helps, the function is gone on my phone and laptop

[ClutterMumbo]

I like the part where when I add a song from smart shuffle to my playlist it completely destroys the queue and reshuffles the entire playlist, so if I saw two smart shuffle songs I wanted to add to my playlist and click on the first one to add it? The second one is now gone because it's "re-smart shuffled". Great feature.

Also a huge fan of how smart shuffle is deterministic with it's shuffle order if you make no changes to playlist, unlike the normal shuffle feature.

You know what feature you had that was basically this, but actually working, and not a completely exhausting fight to use? Enhance Playlist. It's still mind boggling you decided to take a working feature and go 'But what if we remade it, except worse?'

Two years later, I am still asking you to PLEASE allow us to turn off this garbage in the settings.

Every. Single. Spotify update. The first thing I do is search the settings menu for "Smart Shuffle" hoping to see a toggle option show up.

[strerd]

Spotify - 2/10. Smart Shuffle is carp (spelling mistake intentional)

- ads break the stream, rebooting twice doesn't help

- artists I've banned come back to my playlist regardless of having been blocked

- it has skip limits (you go over & you have to wait an hour)

- you can't listen to any track (you're limited by the algorithm - artists like last week come up 1/15 tracks)

- doesn't add to various playlists (70s, classical, etc.)

- ads showing while playing music in the Now Playing panel

- Feature Songs pop up frequently (& there no way to stop them - you're limited to 6 skips per hour). 

+ the collection of artists immense.

Amazon Music - 4/10.

+ No ad interuptions

- 'We'll thing you like...' cannot be disabled

- it has skip limits

- playlists are buggy

- the tracks show up but they're limited & you can't download everything (1/50 songs is blacked out).

Tidal - I can't rate. It's pay to play & sight unseen, I can't rate it.

Apple Music - I can't rate it. All indications are the same as Amazon Music.

Deezer - 8/10.

- Some ads, but not as many as Spotify,

- Playlists are buggy

+ I can get everything else except Spotify originals (Spotify covers of existing tracks)

+ can play what I like regardless of limits

+ adds to various playlists (you have to go a click them one by one, but the functionality is there), wheras Spotify & Amazon Music have no such thing.

+ sound is exceptional compared to Spotify & Amazon Music

*Under Deezer - I can download 'The Smalls'. My previous statement was untrue. There should be a '+' not a '-' sign.

[Geauxanne]

Please bring back Enhanced. Thanks. 

[QWERTYTREWQ]

Please get rid of this or let me permanently disable it from settings.

[fixurappitstrash999]

whoever decided to make it a 3 toggle option should quit design. do you guys even listen to music? can't even make it work properly, it has to download 500 songs before i can even toggle out of it. on pc its just completely broken. still no hifi lol. fix app.

[liveqube]

Please bring back "create similar playlist" or the "enhance" features to the desktop app. 

[matneym]

Give me an option to permanently disable this "feature." I create playlists for a reason. 

[cacheloko2145]

ok so i have this issue every time i have a recommended song i do not like i press remove recommendation / remove from que in this pictures you can see the song bye by Ariana grande and the other song ho hey by the Lumineers. both of those songs i have removed multiple time from the recommendation yet they are still showing up. how do i stop them from showing up again i have tried to remove them from the recommendation list on the pc and on my phone but ever 20-30 minute they come back

[Dunn]

Oh but you see, it is Smart shuffle, it knows what you want, you are just
mistaken and should let go of your limiting tastes in music and enjoy
whatever the smart shuffle wants you to listen to. Also all this community
should let go of the wrong notion that Spotify gives a s*** about customer
feedback, cause we're just money sources, and we're dumb anyway, proven by
the fact that we're too paralyzed by the convenience of staying in Spotify
with all our queues and customs to leave a service that clearly does not
respect it's customers. Well I left like a year ago now, went back to my
old downloaded playlists on my phone and computer, and from time to time I
go buy music in Bandcamp. Not like Spotify supports "content creators" that
much. Let me tell you, it is not the end of the world. Life was ok before
we got used to have music or a podcast in the background at all times.

[meerow]

Podcasts are everywhere, in fact there are less Podcasts on Spotify than in the free web. Just use your Podcasts app instead of Spotify and you are fine. You will be rewarded by nice features such as chapter marks and shownotes and you will be less spammed by advertisements. Spotify is trying to trap users by the feeling they would loose their Podcasts when canceling but thats not the case.

[Tibazz]

Please just introduce true random shuffle, none of the shuffle settings are any good in spotify and it is easily the worst part about the system.

I have one big playlist with more or less all songs i like at the moment and even the regular shuffle keeps giving me the**bleep** soooo often that i have now resorted to removing said songs from the list. Why does the system insist on playing what it thinks i like instead of just doing what i want it to do ?!?!

Tibazz

[shoxwort]

I utterly despise this "feature" - it is ill-conceived and incompetently implemented. Enhance was a far superior customer experience. The fact we STILL can't permanently disable this horrendous idea makes it clear that Spotify has no interest in listening to their customers' feedback or retaining their market share.

Hopefully enough of us write them off that it will actually impact their wallets, then there may actually be a chance they take notice and take feedback seriously.

[Darth_GTB]

Is this some sort of hidden advertisement? I can't play my Liked Songs playlist anymore because you keep suggesting junk from genres I've never listened to in Spotify. One thing I noticed, most of the suggested songs that pop up are from the same genres of bands that also show up advertising their albums. This looks very sketchy... Are you being paid to play unrelated songs to artificially inflate listening count for the studios?

Shuffle should never play songs that are not part of the playlist, even if the song "makes sense". That's not what shuffle mean. Shuffle means to, you know, shuffle the items you already have and play in the shuffled order. Like a deck of cards. You can't add Spanish cards to a standard French deck. That's not Smart Shuffle. That's Dumb Shuffle. You can't play a game with a deck shuffled like that.

[Darth_GTB]

Hey, people... I've just noticed something... Why are you all using the desktop app? You don't need that. Open the web version on your PC on virtually any Chromium browser (except for Opera which amazingly doesn't have the feature I'm going to describe) and save Spotify as a PWA:

This will have Spotify working under your ad and tracker blocker and will be possible to pin to your taskbar and Start menu just like a normal app. It will then open like a normal window:

I don't use Chrome. The first screenshot was Chrome just to give the path to the functionality the way most people would find it. The bottom one is what it would look like on Vivaldi, but wouldn't be too different from other browsers

I use all sorts of web apps this way, like WhatsApp, Outlook, etc. The ones marked below are web apps. You would never guess by just looking at it:

I have MS Teams twice there because sometimes the desktop version becomes too slow when the internet isn't very good and the web version works better (I don't always work at the office). There are more in my Start menu that I use less frequently like ChatGPT, Google Keep, Google Calendar, etc.

Some pages aren't made specifically to work as a PWA, but you can still make a window with them by choosing the "Create Shortcut" option

Remember: there are 2 reasons why companies with a web app would create a desktop app: 1, it's cheaper to just generate an Electron build of a web app and have only one development team and 2, the user can't control trackers and ads as easily on a dedicated desktop version. When you realise that, you just use the web version because chances are, you already have the browser open, so the extra RAM being used is less than loading Electron, which is essentially an extra browser running a page (and it tends to take a lot more disk space than you would expect).