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

🌟 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.

[Joan]

Hi there folks,

We're here to say that we've taken your feedback into account and you will now be able to disable Smart Shuffle from the app settings, as described in this now implemented idea! 

The steps are as follows:

1. Tap your profile picture at the top.
2. Tap Settings and privacy.
3. Select Playback.
4. Switch Enable all play modes off.

This is for Premium users only and is only available on mobile at the moment, but rest assured it will be coming to desktop in due time as well.

Cheers!

[oblivious]

Let’s get real why you did this. To profit more, by having to pay for less content, and also to promote more of the same artists and make them and yourself more money.

We aren’t dumb.

As software engineer I know this feature doesn’t require any overhead or maintenance for you given the facilities you already have and using.

No reason you would keep this feature for artist but not playlist.

That smart shuffle nonsense isn’t even the same thing and we know it. It makes u listen to same old playlist same old songs and inserts only couple crappy songs.

Keep it if you want it, but don’t remove the core feature which built your company. Or you spent too much time developing silly snake games and think will people get distracted?

Features like this built your company. And removing features like this can destroy your company. You are Spotify. You are nothing compared to your competition giants like Amazon or Apple and their resources despite your market share.

Couple mistakes like this, accumulated over time, and before you know it you return to what you came from, nothing. Getting bought out and closed down by your competition, since you lost all listeners.

Return this feature, there is more than enough requests already in the other threads too, you ignoring those people and not following your policies just shows you have sinister intentions removing it.

I was heading to the gym, wanted to listen to fresh songs based of my existing playlists, because smart shuffle just gives same **bleep** in old playlist, and daily mixes are terrible they just give u old artists u don’t wanna listen anymore and are sick of. And now this feature is gone. Thanks for wasting my time having to spend 30min researching what did you do and how to return it and writing this, and your dumb site on the phone misbehaving and making the message disappear had to write it all again.

When I get back home I’m gonna start researching the prices and availability of your competitors as well as features. There are already free tools to transfer playlists so I won’t miss anything. As long as I find one with playlist radio-like feature, I’m gone. You stop caring about your listeners for years now, after gaining too much good faith from people early on. And now just try to appear good in public, making silly snake games to appease and trick people, yet ignore 10s of thousands of replies and threads here about this issue.

[jj183]

Smart shuffle is Spotify Enhanced! Except it’s now hidden in a place you never go, completely separate from the playlist you would use it to manage, and kills the function of the real shuffle button on the way. Please consider reinstating Enhanced.

[abjecttestament]

Please switch back to enhanced playlists. Smart shuffle is far worse. I'd prefer to not have to wait while shuffle loads because the regular shuffle button was hijacked. I want to see the recommendations in the playlist. It's also very difficult to tell at a glance if this is turned on

[Aryang75]

Have you developed a disable for smart shuffle or perhaps a separate button?  It’s cause so many problems especially when I’m offline.  It’s even made me considering going to Apple Music and I don’t want to.

[shorr]

Yeah, thank you for nothing. Instead, you could make that I sort my playlists independently and not by first letter or recently played. It feels like you are making for every unnecessary step forward two backflips in critical (and obviously necessary things) like custom sort of playlists.

[noxere]

it's absolutely absurd that this hasn't been fixed/removed after hundreds of complaints like this. I've been a premium member since 2017 and this is seriously making me consider ending my membership.

[Catieball13]

Please please pleaseeeeee get rid of this feature. It automatically switches on to smart shuffle every time I open my app then plays the same 5 songs. I cannot make it stop

[JustMe007]

Please remove the new feature "Smart-Shuffle". When, or if, I'd like to listen to Spotify-recommendations I go to a Spotify-generated playlist, or add recommendet songs. It annoys me to no end, having to wait 10 seconds when I just want to switch from normal (!) shuffle to non-shuffled. The Smart-Shuffle totally messes up my thoughtfully designed playlists. Maybe, add another button for this feature, or make it possible to turn off Smart-Shuffle completely in the settings.

[Kewleen]

I preferred the Enhance feature much more and I’m very sad to see it has been taken away. I hope they can add it back. It was very helpful for finding music when you listen to a lot of different genres. For example, I had a playlist just for French music and the Enhance button would only add in recommendations for French music when I was in that playlist. Now, it’s very hard to find recommendations because smart shuffle just adds all sorts of random songs and it’s not user friendly the way Enhance was.

I am crossing my fingers that enough users will prefer Enhance and that it will be brought back instead. Smart shuffle does not compare to Enhance. 

[giovannig]

Please, I beg you, implement the option to PERMANENTLY disable this feature.

[jjf46n2]

I would like to reiterate that I'm not asking that this unnecessary feature be made optional. I'm letting you know that I'm aware that making the option to get rid of this available to us is very easily within your power, as you just had a version of the app that worked fine without this **bleep**. If it isn't "fixed" within the next month or two I will have to explain to several family members that they aren't getting free Spotify now and I've been using this service since closed beta. This is very disheartening.

Also, if you didn't feel the need to game your shuffle algorithm so much maybe people wouldn't feel compelled to smash the shuffle button repeatedly to get a something different for once. We're not **bleep**ing stupid.

[justjoshjams]

i like to toggle between Shuffle, repeat, and neither. That’s a been a standard feature since the beginning. 

smart shuffle makes toggling very difficult because the app gets stuck on turning smart shuffle on/off.

to make toggling easy, spotify should either speed up toggling through smart shuffle or enable users to completely disable it so it doesn’t even show up when toggling between shuffle and repeat. 

it’s sooooooooo annoying.

[jamescarian]

As a long time Spotify user, the Smart Shuffle feature has been the first change I've strongly disliked in the entire time I've used the platform (roughly 6 years). I find it incredibly frustrating to have to cycle through this option when I want to switch from shuffling a playlist, to playing straight through it. That's all I want, those two options. The smart shuffle option could easily be a feature enabled/disabled from settings. Please make this happen because it's awful, and having to second guess whether I've hit the shuffle button again 2 or 3 times constantly (and thus to know whether I'm back on regular shuffle or Smart Shuffle) is not enjoyable. And then I go back to listening, and suddenly I hear a song that I know is not part of my playlist. And then I need to go back to the app, and hit the shuffle button again to turn off Smart Shuffle. I think you get the idea, Spotify. Make it an option, not part of the native experience of the app.

[wayllium]

This HAS to be one of the more stupid decisions that spotify has released lately. The whole UX department needs to be replaced. How anyone in their right mind would think annoying a user is a good idea?

the enhanced feature, although useless to me was non-intrusive. I didn’t mind it being there. then it was moved to a smart shuffle feature that takes time to load every time I have to turn on or off shuffle. Anyone to think this was a good idea must’ve been dropped on their head as a child.

This on top of removing liked song marker in playlists and the idiotic playlist filters in the library tab that need to be filtered every time a user needs to only views their playlists, which is 100% of the time for me and takes another annoying step every time I go to my library.

its been years since the whole community is asking for meaningful and useful changes and improvements yet the spotify UX team thinks this time is better utilized at half baking broken user interface that will eventually bite back once the competition steps up. Not even going to go  into lossless offerings from the competition.

The only reason I haven’t switched to apple music is because they have hidden their shuffle option which I think is even more dumb.

[wolfmouths]

I'm back to reiterate just how intrusive and annoying the implementation of this feature is. I just got a banner "ad" within the app telling me to use smart shuffle. No way. I pay to NOT have ads, to use the app the way I want. I want to permanently disable this feature. I hate pressing play on a "shuffled" playlist and randomly hearing songs that aren't on it!

Delete this feature or let people toggle it off forever. Truly bad design. 

[Lynn8630]

Smart shuffle is the biggest pain. I loved the enhance button that I could toggle when I wanted. Now every time I go to change the shuffle I have to cycle through smart shuffle? That's stupid, I don't always want to enhance my playlist. Most of the time I just want to listen to what I've got. I like to shuffle, unshuffle, and reshuffle over and over again until it queues a list of songs from my very large playlist that I feel like listening to at the moment. This is now far too difficult to do because of the forced smart shuffle. The only fix is to go to offline mode but even then it still tries every time and tells be to go online to use the feature. Please just go back to the enhance feature and forever get rid of smart shuffle. Biggest inconvenience ever. If it is not fixed soon, I will find my music elsewhere.

[catcat985]

EVERYONE is agreeing that smart shuffle sucks, it takes too long to have to cycle through the options, on top of it having to load for 5 seconds. and sometimes it doesnt even work so sometimes we get stuck on shuffle and lose the ability to have linear playlists. at least give us an option to turn it off.

[daturaloca]

 👎 👎 👎 👎

I hate the Smart Shuffle thing. I want to toggle shuffle on and off, not to connect the internet, wait seconds for no reasons and click the icon again. I cannot even shuffle my song if I have connection issues or no internet. 👎

We don't want smart shuffle and this BS, we want you to fire your product manager and UI designers or who ever came up with this idea. To the disgraced programmers working on**bleep**, please DO NOT TOUCH anything,rebel against your incompetent managers or just quit your workplace and go farming.

[Angryaboutsmartshuff]

Its incredibly irritating that if I want to turn off shuffle, I have to wait for smart shuffle to put together a bunch of recommendations I never asked for first. I don’t want these recommendations. I would like to be able to turn smart shuffle off permanently from the settings.

[1254097899]

bad move to change a standard function in a way that degrades ux. if Spotify is still discovery focused in this moment, please note enhanced was the better tool — more integrated, easier to toggle, more customizable, etc. smart shuffle is more cumbersome in all ways imaginable, with a poor ui requiring additional steps to access and review, plus the added con of adding an extra step to toggling the original basic function.