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.

[Fab_Ian]

Please allow me to disable smart shuffle or at least add a second shuffle button or so to make it harder to enable it. It is so darn frustrating to have it freeze my Spotify app and forcing me to kill the app, probably as it tries to download songs with my mobile data plan 😭😭😭

That feature never added any benefit to my life so far, only frustration - especially annoying when driving a car where you cannot afford such distraction.

[marconerodr]

This is actually a feature that ruins user experience. You should consider users like me, that pay for offline downloads because we use the app on places with little to no phone signal, so when we try to activate shuffle we must go through smart shuffle, which takes a lot of time to load and ruins experience. This feature should have an on/off button so we don't have to necessarily go through it.

[FarOFF_27]

The slider button is not available 

the play mode is set aas shuffle by default and I’m not able to turn is off

please help me and resolve this bug or ……whatever it is 

**bleep** 

[igowtf666]

Can you at least have an option to turn off/on this new feature ? It so annoying and everytime I am on the "smart shuffle" it loads so freaking long and scr3w my next song list. I thought the removal was permanent but guess not. 

[johnvestevich]

How do you disable smart shuffle?

[justinjtau]

Please make a feature to disable smart shuffle in settings so that we're able to reshuffle our queue without having to go through Smart Shuffle every time. 

[Swedania]

Please just remove Smart shuffle or give us an option to disable it. It is just super annoying and can take forever to load and its more like a dumb ad then anything else. We pay to not have ads.

And Smart shuffle was added previously and was removed shortly after because it was not liked, so why has it been re added?

I can also say that Smart shuffle is more annoying than when an update removed the ability to fast forward, skip and rewind.

[zvtnt]

I agree about this being an awful "feature" and I can't seem to disable it PERIOD. I tap shuffle and it says "smart shuffle recommendations added to queue" and I wait a bit, tap it again and it says the same thing. Doesn't matter how many times I tap it, says the same thing. My playlist is far too big to sift through all the annoying and unwanted songs that Spotify adds. 2100 song playlist. Please bring back enhance, remove smart shuffle.

[xandaar]

This is a very poor replacement for the playlist based radiostations. Spotify takes away an actually useful feature and then adds this very annoying one in its place. No one asked for this! Bring back playlist based radio stations!! Your playlist creation is bad. Your radio stations based on artists are bad. This feature is bad. BRING BACK PLAYLIST BASED RADIO STATIONS! 

[arkadiusdm]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

(iPhone XR)

Operating System

iOS16.5

My Question or Issue

Almost every time I cyclethrough the shuffle options (smartshuffle, normal shuffle, and no shuffle) when i cycle through smart shuffle it skips the current song playing and messes up entire queues for me. This has been one of the most frustrating issues plaguing me, it is constant, and has never stopped. I have resorted to simply just not cycling through shuffle options, and just making queues every single time. I used to be able to shuffle through my playlists quickly and easily, now it's impossible to shuffle songs whatsoever it feels like. At times, it's skipped 5 songs in a row because i cycled through the shuffle options five times. Smart shuffle is one of the most useless options spotify has added to the app. It feels like with every update they put out, their goal is simply to frustrate more and more users. Why is there not an option to just toggle smart shuffle off? Why are we forced to cycle through it? Another issue with it is that my shuffle feature literally does not work now unless I am connected to the internet because smart shuffle absolutely needs internet to work. So as a user who pays for premium so I can download my songs and use them in offline mode, I lose the simple ability to shuffle my songs entirely. I am so close to just switching to apple music, at least their UI and algorithm is not as messed up as Spotify's.

[ash12swanson]

I’ve not tested it yet, but I don’t hate the idea of smart shuffle, however… it has completely broken the shuffle button for me. I used to be able to tap the shuffle button to disable shuffle and then re-enable it to refresh the songs coming up next, but now:

1. The shuffle button is unresponsive after smart shuffle is activated, I have to go back twice to the playlist page to be able to toggle shuffle again.
2. What used to be a quick double tap to refresh the next up songs has become a slow “go back twice, tap, wait, tap, wait, tap, wait, check next up” repeated until I’m happy with the songs coming up.

[Cluepac]

Please provide a way to disable the Smart Shuffle "feature" it is incredibly inconvenient to have to push the shuffle button repeatedly or answer a prompt.

[rlc4181]

Most annoying feature EVER and it ate up all of my data because the ones they throw in your playlist aren't downloaded. I will be changing to Apple music or Google if they don't make this go away soon. Spotify has been my Fav but the fact that you cant turn this option off permanately is just annoying AF

[ChayD]

The "shuffle" algorithm is bad enough as it is (i.e. if a user has a fairly large playlist, it *seems* to favor certain tracks over others - maybe based on previous play frequency?) because of this, I deleted a bunch of tracks that I've gotten sick of hearing, and guess what, "smart shuffle" tries to add them back (and it's *always...the...same...tracks...every...time*, it wouldn't be so bad if it used the same algorithm used for Discover Weekly which actually does come up with good recommendations), and takes its sweet time in doing so, and then leaves them in the play queue (at least the first track of the newly recommended tracks), even when you go back to normal shuffle. "Simply click on the shuffle button again to cancel" (or whatever recommendation Spotify come up with) is merely a workaround, and does not resolve the underlying UX issue in that this feature has been forced upon unwilling users with no option to disable it completely (sure, some users may like it, but not everyone does) If Spotify aren't going to listen to and act on their customer's comments, then they're going to lose those customers to competing services, me being one of them.

[Sk8h8]

Make it go away ! Complete **bleep** ! 

[quesobro]

Unfortunately, this is back and ruining the regular shuffle button again. Shuffling should be a one-tap experience, and it should be an on-off cycle instead of the unshuffled-shuffled-*delay*“smart” shuffled cycle. The idea is great, but it needs to be separate from the shuffle button or able to toggle off, 

[babot]

Heavily considering switching to a different platform because of this feature. When it was first trialed last year I was not a fan and provided feedback. None of the commenters on that thread were keen about this either. I hated it last year. I hate it now. It’s not a feature, it’s an incovenience. Whoever reported that the trial last year on this was positive was obviously full of it. Im yet to come across a comment stating how they love it and it elevated spotify. Give us the option to disable it altogether. The app can barely handle turning it off after it’s defaulted to turn on whenever we try to shuffle. 

[sebaszapien]

Don't sweat it, Spotify, you don't have to reinvent the wheel to impress, just make a shuffle button... shuffle without being 3 things at the same time

[Kiirus]

The smart shuffle is a very good feature. I like it a lot more than enhance. I just hope it gets its own button. Also, I think enhance should stay as an alternative for those people who prefer it to smart shuffle. Also give enhance its own button.

To me though, smart shuffle is perfect. Just move it from the shuffle button to its own button. 

[themonarc]

I have Smart Shuffle and the "+" on iOS, while on macOS I have Enhance and the heart button. Absolute clown show UX. Spotify has like 9,000 employees, how are these changes actually made in production?