Shuffle play with large playlists

[DBarnes18]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Samsung Galaxy 10e

Operating System

Android 

My Question or Issue

PLEASE address the issues with Shuffle play algorithms, particularly regarding larger (>100) playlists!  I have a playlist with ~800 songs/52+ hours of music, and I keep hearing the same songs over and over and over...   

I would expect, from a purely mathematical standpoint, if I played my playlist 24x7 I wouldn't hear the same song again, even in shuffle mode, for two days.  Instead I keep getting many of the same songs over and over.  And I know a lot of songs in there absolutely never come up.  (Mind you, I've been working on the playlist for 2+ years, so the pattern is quite evident!)

I don't know how your algorithms work, with "Likes" and "Favorites" and who knows what AI all worked in, but the point of a large playlist is so you DON'T hear the same song(s) too frequently!  

I've seen complaints about "shuffle randomization" in the forum going back years!  With a lot of issues winding up in "Not an Issue", like the user just doesn't understand how shuffle works...?  Well, we do understand how we would LIKE it to work, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do something about it?  (I generally enjoy Spotify, but this really does effect the enjoyability of the overall experience.  And there are other music streaming alternatives...)

Thanks, have a great day!

[Jeremy]

Thank you for your reply and feedback.

We understand that things can feel frustrating when things don't work as you'd like them to. Rest assured that we're always trying to improve as we always strive to improve our features.

There's currently an idea - [All Platforms] Option to have a true shuffle. If you'd like to show your support to the idea you can give it a Like. You can also Subscribe to it to make sure that you don't miss any updates.

Once again - thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it. Let us know if we can help you with anything else.

Take care!
 

[Greos]

I gave up on Spotify about 5 years ago because of this. In my opinion, it's not worth waiting for them to add this feature. They're obviously not interested in providing such value to their clients. It's amazing they call a suggested shuffle feature "true shuffle" Their current shuffle should be labelled as "fake shuffle"!

[MusicMunkee]

Dear Jeremy,

I have the same problem with the actual spotify shuffle function, it keeps repeating over and over the same 12 songs of a 700+ playlist. This really had to be repaired ! Cause its a bug. Dont think anyone can assume this to call a feature.

As you are linking us to this "new" shuffle idea. This idea is now more than one year old, probably theres now a lot of progress in it, how's the actual status on it?

[bogatkev]

Basically the title. When I shuffle my playlist it keeps repeating the songs whenever I stop streaming and restart streaming. I want to go through the WHOLE playlist.

[safetyjs]

how can it be hard in any way to just get full list of songs in given playlist where user wants to listen to the music in random order - then shuffle!!!! it randomly and let user listen... really? and then when user press the shuffle button again it takes the list again and app shuffles it... it shouldn't take more then 0.003 ms for a playlist that consists even of 10000 songs... come on

[Atek_1]

When shuffling, only 80 songs are being played instead of the whole playlist.

[linsomniac]

I'd even be ok if it was truly selecting 80 songs out of the playlist, but I have a "likes" playlist of 1,294 songs, and I'll hear ~10 of the songs a few times a week despite repeated shuffles, and I'll hear the same songs repeated in a couple hour session, which seems to put it more around 25-30 songs rather than 80.  But even then, it seems to be a set of songs that somehow are not randomly selected from the playlist, it's maybe selecting out of the first 100-200 songs, and older stuff doesn't show up.

[Nms248]

This helped me make my decision to get youtube red instead of spotify premium, thanks jeremy!

[nadzz_18]

Any progress on this issue/feature?

[lCutterl]

So pathetic. A subject that is nearly a decade old. A comment that is nearly 5 years old from some moderator dude named Jeremy who likely doesn't even work at Spotify anymore, and not a damn thing has changed. Extremely pathetic, lousy customer service, serious lack of anyone's ability to show that they remotely care whatsoever about their people and this issue. 

Never in my life of 50 years of listening to music and the ability of "shuffle" which is been a thing since cassettes in a car stereo and yet here we are the digital age, and a paid subscription for 20 freaking dollars a month, and this company still can't seem to put it together. Here it is nearly 2025, and I still can't get a playlist of 5,000 songs to shuffle without hearing the same song twice within an hour. 

The fact that you people still can't understand what shuffle means, or think that we need**bleep** called "true shuffle" has to be the most truly pathetic excuse for moderators washing their hands of a subject that means something to their customers and not doing a damn thing about it. It's no wonder that you continue to lose subscribers. You guys are pretty worthless, and it's pretty pathetic you can't fix something so simple as a **bleep** shuffle. 🖕🏾🤬