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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.
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
🌟 I would like to disable Smart Shuffle permanently. Can I do that?
Yes, you can! Just go to Settings and privacy and then to Playback and toggle the option Enable all play modes to off. This will mean you will only have the regular shuffle.
Note: This option is for Premium users only.
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.
Spotify, have you noticed how this announcement has been hit with mostly bad feedback since day 1? The first page, back from when this was announced has about the same feedback as the last one. 99% of people dislike this functionality. Every now and then you see somebody who actually likes it, but the way you implemented this is terrible UX.
You made it the only possible shuffle in the free tier too, so you seem to have actually made this to bully your free users into buying a subscription, so we can turn it off. But reading other replies in here, I'm convinced even the paid subscribers are having a bad time turning this feature off.
Can't you just accept this is a failure of a feature and drop it? Or at least make it reasonable? Your normal shuffle isn't great either though. I think both shuffles should be changed to actually convey what their names mean:
- Shuffle (free tier): random order from every song in the playlist
- Smart Shuffle (paid tier): random order from every song in the playlist, but prevents the same song to play again in the next 5% of playlist songs. For example, if I have 100 songs in my playlist, unless I manually choose to, smart shuffle should only let a song be eligible to show up in the order after 5 songs. If this could get too resource expensive with longer playlists, instead of %, it could be limited to x songs. So, lets say 10 songs. We have 1k songs in a playlist. As soon as we start playing on smart shuffle, the algorithm starts adding songs to the queue. The algorithm could already calculate the next 10 songs. By the time the first music ends, you will calculate the 11th. All you have to do is pick something at random, check if it's already in the queue and only add it if it's not. If it is, pick another one.
If you really want to include an option with sponsored content, don't call it "something shuffle", because that's not what shuffle means. Call it "enhanced playlist" or "include recommendations" or something like that.
Edit: about that last paragraph. It could actually be a checkbox. So you would only have 1 Shuffle option (or 2 if you are willing to commit to my smart shuffle redesign above) and 1 Ordered option. Both with a checkbox saying "Include recommendations". This would insert your sponsored content every, I don't know, 5 songs or so.
Here is a suggestion on what it could look like on the interface (nevermind the "Premium" tags. I forgot to remove it from the screenshot to better align with my suggestion above):
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