shuffle playlist seems to play the same songs

[hypergreatthing]

Whenever i'm in the car, i turn on android auto and play a playlist that's already on shuffle, but on the way home i hear the same songs. I have 809 songs in the playlist, i don't think in a 15 minute drive i should be hearing the same sequence of songs.

[gulfcoastPnut]

I've cancelled my premium subscription over this, if I wanted to hear 50 songs over and over I'd get XM radio. 

Not sure the other service I'm test driving will be a lot different, but so far, at least the several thousand tracks on shuffle pulls out things I haven't heard for a while.

[12138189748]

• The URI of an affected playlist.
  It's my liked songs playlist - there is no share-able link.
• How many songs it contains and roughly how many of them get played & repeated?
  2,462 songs. The amount of them that get replayed depends on how long I've been listening to my playlist. If I listened for 2 hours at work on the web browser, then 2 hours of songs restart when I get in the car on my phone app. Separately, a new issue has begun when using Smart Shuffle - every time I add one of the Smart songs to my "Liked Songs" playlist, the Smart Shuffle playlist will start from the beginning and replay every song in the exact same order already played. I can add songs to other playlists without issue, just not my liked songs.
• Does this happen with only specific playlists or all of them?
  All of them, but the playlist I spend the most time playing from is my Liked Songs.
• The device this occurs on & its OS version.
  Occurs on my Samsung S22 phone app and my Lenovo Thinkpad web browser, in both Edge and Chrome. The Thinkpad is on Windows 11. 
• Your Spotify app version.
  Phone app: 9.0.88.1405
  I'm not using the app on my laptop because the app download file shows corrupted, won't let me uninstall/reinstall, so I use the web browser.
• The time & date this has occurred on so that we can check your activity backstage.
  This happens every time I switch from my web browser to my phone and try to continue my playlist or switch from my phone to my web browser and try to continue my playlist. I haven't been documenting exact dates and time, but I normally get to work at 0800 EDT (UTC/GMT-4) and leave around 1700 EDT(UTC/GMT-4) Monday-Friday.

[14sirs]

"same Songs" - in my 2k song playlist, the same 5 songs should not be playing IN THE EXACT SAME ORDER when shuffle is on

[Vasil]

Hey folks!

I see most of you have yet to provide the requested details from this floated post so we'd ask you to do so in order for us to be able to properly look into this 🙂

Please do so after you've installed the following updates which should become available for you soon:

• For Android & iOS apps: 9.0.94.63
• For desktop: 1.2.76.218

Much appreciated! We'll be on the lookout for your replies.

[izzycouture]

Plan - Premium

Country - USA

Device - iPhone

I have been having a problem for a few months now where, when playing one of my long playlists on shuffle (>250 hours), my queue repeats large sections of songs that have previously been played (I've experienced the app repeating sections of 100+ songs when this happens). If I haven't used the app for a few hours, the shuffle will randomly select a song that was played previously, and then it repeats the exact same queue I already listened to from that point on. I have to scroll through all of these songs that have made their way back into my queue again before I can actually listen to songs that haven't been played yet in the shuffle. I've never have the repeat queue function turned on either. 

I've tried restarting my phone, and I've also deleted and redownloaded the Spotify app to no avail. I don't know if this is an issue that could be caused by the sheer size of the playlist or not, since I didn't experience this problem until a few months ago (and the playlist in question has been over 200 hours long for quite a while). 

[smartycope]

This issue is a duplicate of https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/shuffle-playlist-seems-to-play-the-same-songs/m-p/5507.... I'm making a new thread, as it was marked as solved, however I don't believe it is, and I have more details to add.

Plan

Premium

Country

us-en

Device

Device a:

Spotify web app (tested this behavior on both Chrome & Firefox).

Device b:

Tested this behavior on both a Google Pixel 7 pro & Google Pixel 8 pro. Last tested on version 9.1.2.1253.

Operating System

Tested this behavior (when using the web app) on both Windows and Ubuntu.

Playlist in Question

Liked Songs

Issue

If songs in a playlist (specifically liked songs, I have not tested extensively with other playlists) are played for a while (with shuffle enabled, not smart shuffle) on one platform (i.e. web player), and then switched to another platform (i.e. mobile app), the same songs are played in the same order starting from where the 2nd platform was originally at.

I have taken statistics classes, I understand "random" does not always mean "evenly shuffled". This however is the same 8 hours of songs in the exact same order. I've been observing this behavior for months now, and it's consistent. It is extremely statistically unlikely this is random behavior. I can look at the "next in queue" page and see the same songs I listened to previously.

I will point out that if I have Spotify open on both Chrome & Firefox, and switch from one to the other, it exhibits this behavior, but upon refreshing the page, the queue syncs and starts playing random songs again.

As a form of confirmation, I've attached a screenshot of my history of songs I listened to yesterday (on Spotify Web Player for Firefox), and my current queue. Shuffle has been enabled the entire time. You will note that (pardon the title) "**bleep**" is not in the queue, because I removed it from my Liked Songs while listening to it yesterday.

I have also tried playing a different playlist, then going back to the liked songs and shuffling them again, and the same queue gets loaded.

P.S. This link: https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/postpage/board-id/yourlibrary is broken while signed in on Chrome, though it works on Firefox.

[courtney43jordan]

I'm having the exact same issue with my 334 hour playlist. I threw everything into one playlist so that I could shuffle and listen to everything...however, it's the same 30 songs over and over no matter what I do. If I clear my cache and log out and all the things, it just picks a new set of 30 songs to replay over and over on "shuffle". I've had Spotify Premium since about 2014 and I'm about to give up on it. 

[Maria]

Hey there @smartycope,

Thanks for reaching out on the Community!

We've merged your post with another thread, as this will give us a better overview and keeps things in the same place, hope you don't mind. It's worth noting that even if a topic is marked as solved or has a Top Answer, we're still keeping an eye on it.

On another note, we appreciate you taking the time to share your details with us - it'll help us look into things further.

Cheers!

[courtney43jordan]

I did some changes to my settings that have seemed to help so far today.

I started by clearing the cache under settings, Data-saving and offline, clear cache.

Restarted my phone.

In Spotify settings under playback:

-Toggled off "Autoplay"

-Toggled "Standard" shuffle on instead of the "fewer repeats".

Ironically, this has made my playlist today more shuffled than it has in a long time and there have been many songs I haven't heard in a long time, which is the exact opposite it says under the "standard" shuffle setting.

[courtney43jordan]

I spoke too soon. I am once again stuck in a repeat of the same 30-40 songs.

[cowboyKram]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

PC, Droid 

Operating System

Windows 11, Android

I have a huge liked playlist of 373 songs, which will give me something like 47 days of continuous music, without repeating. Why do I hear the same 15-20 songs (with random others mixed in) multiple times a day? I would use the smart shuffle, but I don't want any other recommendations. I just want to hear a true random shuffle.

My Question or Issue

[FakeShuffle]

I'm not talking about it "seeming" like shuffle plays the same songs over and over or even getting 1 or 2 repeats a day which could inherently actually just be due to RNG (but still not likely when my playlist is nearly 3,000 songs), but instead I'm getting literal lists of 20-30 songs in a row that are in *exactly* in the same order. 

So admittedly, I have a tendency to skip a lot of songs in a row to find something I'd like to listen to in the moment. I have noticed on more than one occasion (probably half a dozen times now, honestly) over the last month, that the lists I am skipping through are perfect matches to a list I skipped through the previous day or sometimes even as short as an hour prior. When I notice a list of songs that is the same as one I went through recently, I try to break the cycle by manually clicking a new song (rather than using the "next" button) and still find myself back in the same loop within a few songs later. 

This is proving that Spotify shuffle is clearly *not* actually shuffling anything, but generating lists ahead of time, repeating them, and hoping you don't notice. 

Additionally, I will never use "Smart" shuffle because I do *not* want to listen to songs that are not already on my playlist, so I rely on regular shuffle to actually be shuffled! 

This is absolutely a new phenomenon and is seriously annoying, almost to the point of starting to dislike the app. 

[swademc]

I had what sounds like the same problem today. Jumped in the car, Spotify started playing automatically from my Liked Songs (1000 tracks) on shuffle via bluetooth. On the way home, same thing but I heard the exact same songs as on the drive out. So Spotify had forgotten where I was in the shuffled queue. Not great but I can manage. The bigger issue is that after skipping through the queue, it became clear that the queue was very "shallow", and I started hearing the same songs again with maybe 20 or 50 skips. How hard can it be to make a queue of equal length to the original playlist? You can easily do it with a shuffled array of indices pointing to the original array. Not hard in any programming language.

[swademc]

How long is the sequence generated? It should be equal in length to the original playlist. I observe two issues today. 1. Spotify forgets the current position in the current queue. Not great, but we could deal with that by skipping a few songs if it weren't for the next issue. 2. The real issue seems to be that the queue created by toggling shuffle on is only 20 to 50 songs long, so it's very easy to hear the same sequence again and again even when 'shuffling' a 1000 song playlist, because the shuffled queue only contains a small fraction of those tracks.

[swademc]

Same issue today. Queue created by shuffling a playlist does not have the same number of songs as the original playlist. Instead it contains only 20 to 50 songs out of 1000. How can a shuffled queue generated from a playlist not have an equal number of songs to that playlist? That is a very simple programming challenge. A randomized array of indexes is not hard to generate, store or use. Come on Spotify!

[Conchobar26]

Premium Plan

Nothing Phone 3

Latest Version of Android

Had this issue across multiple devices. Just got a new phone and am seeing the same problem with my 1300 song playlist as I had on my old phone.

I don't even have to close the app. If I pause music and leave the phone for a while, when I come back I get the same songs in my queue after 10 minutes or so of listening. This behaviour was immediately noticeable on the new phone, implying caching isn't the issue. Nothing was migrated from my old phone. Fresh install, fresh download of my playlist. Immediate issue.

Only fix is to reshuffle my playlist each time.

[Vasil]

Hey folks, 

For anyone else still experiencing this issue - note that we need the information from the floated post in order to further investigate this behaviour:

• The URI of an affected playlist.
• How many songs it contains and roughly how many of them get played & repeated?
• Does this happen with only specific playlists or all of them?
• The device this occurs on & its OS version.
• Your Spotify app version.
• The time & date this has occurred on so that we can check your activity backstage.
  
  

Many thanks! We're on the lookout for new replies here.

[Loneliest_Cabin]

If it's your Liked Songs playlist you can just tell us that, as you won't have a shareable URI. 

[tupperface]

Same issue with „liked songs“, although only with „Smart Shuffle“. The normal shuffle mode is working. Likes songs contains ca. 2500 songs. Have an iphone 11, based in EU, app version 9.1.6.1142.

please help!