Shuffle play is not random

[ws1482]

Shuffle play was bad before the update and now its worse. On my 442 song playlist, the same 30 or 35 tracks play over and over again and the other 400 songs I have barely heard once. I have had to delete songs because shuffle play was choosing them everytime I would listen. Spotify developers say shuffle play is random but how is repeating the same 35 songs over and over random. For some reason there is a higher probability of certain songs playing than others. This is a major flaw in the system. The shuffle play programs needs to be totally overhauled, it is awful

[discbuyertoo]

Seemingly not. There are several helpful suggestions earlier in this thread
- as well as quite a lot of frustration.

[Lenx]

I'm pretty sure it will never be fixed, and here's the reason why:

Shuffle is such a simple feature to program, it should have been right in the first place. After all those years, nothing has been fixed, which i'm sure is intentionally.

Then why is it as such? To know that, we must look at the sole primary purpose of any business, money!

I'm convinced Spotify has an incentive in prioritizing some songs over others. This could be due to a difference in royalties to be paid, or because certain artists or publishers promote their work by paying Spotify to prioritize it in shuffle.

The fact is just so very obvious and really frustrating. For example i have a playlist of a couple 100's of songs, where i once added a whole album to by mistake. When i play the list in shuffle, the songs of that album were constantly playing, time after time! It was driving me nuts and I got so fed up by it that i removed the songs as they came.

[Moniquef95]

The shuffle just doesn’t seem to work at all any more. I have over 2,600 songs and I only hear about 50 of them. The shuffle just keeps playing my recently saved songs just in different orders? Please please fix this, it’s bringing down my love for this app & I’ll have to move if this continues.

[Dvabau]

It does seem to favor recent additions over older songs, so I have resorted to removing some of them as well. After the tenth play in a relatively short period , even a good song gets old.

[Dvabau]

What works for me is shutting it down and then restarting the shuffle at a completely different spot. If will repeat but at least you hear some new songs

[TheClubber]

So it wasn’t just an impression!

I have a playlist with new releases (from 80 to 90 songs which I add and delete weekly according to new releases), but it seems the app only plays the same 15-20 songs! 

[ws1482]

i just played the same playlist on shuffle 2 seperate times today and both times they played the same first 5 or 6 songs. what is going on over here?

[Dvabau]

Be sure to shut it down completely then pick the first song to play before you turn on shuffle

[elsid]

Your advice is correct. Manually choosing the first song to play is the key to a satisfying experience when you expect Spotify shuffle a play list. This advice has been repeated many times on this forum and elsewhere but apparently hardly anyone actually searches for previous answers to questions before posting the same question/complaint again. (Spotify shouldn’t be this way—shuffle should mean shuffle—but the solution is not difficult and it works on every device.)
.

[TheClubber]

So it is incorrect to hit the “Shuffle Play” button to start the listening of a playlist?

Thanks for the advice, I haven’t read anything similar so yet.

[stenetts]

So you select first track, then push shuffle, it then jumps to a different
song and plays most of one album together before going on and playing most
of the next album together. Seems pretty much the same as if you just press
shuffle, unless I am doing it wrong?

[ctreitzell]

My first post to this thread was Jan 2015!

I listened to A LOT of Spotify last year....something like 37, 000 hrs as we were restoring a house that took about 6 months; with Spotify as the music for most of the project.

The only way I found to hear every song in a playlist with hundreds or thousands of songs/tracks is to NOT USE SHUFFLE.

Read back a few pages on this thread and you will find Spotify SHUFFLE essentially holds a "buffer" of 100 playlist entries. If you use SHUFFLE, you will get that buffer of 100 songs; you will continually hear the artists and tracks you manually queue up most frequently. The algorithm is not correct in its assessment that "if a listener listened to "X" then said listener wants to hear "X" every 3 tracks played".

The best way I found to hear all the songs/tracks in a playlist is by filtering by Title. You will get repeats when the song titles are the same; different versions or mixes of the same titled song/track....BUT you will hear evrything. Same if you filter to ALBUM...but then you don't get that "radio" kind of "randomness" of different artists.

I doubt Spotify will ever make their SHUFFLE algo work as many of us suppose it should.

[stenetts]

With you there, the playlist I usually make are only around 100 songs, so I
generally hear them all. The thing I hate is that the playlist will come
from 6 or 7 albums. If I hit shuffle, it basically plays the whole of one
album, although usually mixed a bit, then it will move on to the next one
and do the same thing. When I shuffle, like with iTunes, I would like songs
to play randomly, if I wanted the whole album played together I could just
shuffle the album, there is no point shuffling a playlist of various albums
if it is still going to play each album individually. Sorting by title
helps but can be annoying when you have the normal version of a song plus a
live version and a couple of mixes because then you get the same song 4
times in a row. After 4 years of people complaining I don't expect anything
to change either.

[elsid]

Right. Select a particular song from your playlist and then start playing. Next time you want to shuffle that same playlist, select a different song to start. Once started this way, Spotify will shuffle through even very long playlists with no problem. I don’t understand why Spotify doesn’t inform people about this simple solution since it is problem for many, many people.

[ledrobster]

This doesn't work.  At most it will cycle through a different subset of
99 songs (although in some cases not even that).  This isn't a guess on
my part.  Use the "next" button and click a bunch of times and you will
actually see the precise same pattern of songs repeated, even though the
hundreds of other songs in the list haven't been played yet.  The "start
with a different song and the problem is fixed" idea probably persists
because of the initial novelty of hearing a different 99 songs than
usual.  It will not actually cycle through the whole list.

[elsid]

OK. Technically, you are right. However, the method I described DOES shuffle a typical music playlist for 6 or 7 hours, after which you just pick a so-far unplayed song and start playing for another 5 orb 7 hours. That satisfies me anyway.

[Dvabau]

Actually no, it doesn’t work While it will indeed shuffle a new part of the deck, it will not shuffle the whole deck. Thus this thread

[Parit]

It's now 2019...and still doesn't work!!!

[stenetts]

Don't think they are ever going to bother changing it. Cant be that hard as
others can manage to do it.

[Grits]

I have been lurking on this form for a while, and I have experienced all the same things with Spotify playlists seeming to stick to the same bunch of songs,  and songs repeating too often. I've recently found a semi-solution though, and I would like to verify if it works for everyone. When I navigate through Android Auto in my car to Spotify, select Library then select songs and play that way, it seems I actually do get a brand new list of songs every time, with deep tracks from my library.  If I select the shuffle and repeat icons from the Spotify Android Auto interface, it appears I'm good to go with a brand new shuffled Spotify playlist.

Seems to work for me, and would love to hear if others experience the same.  You can just load Android Auto on your phone, you don't have to use it from your car dash.  Let me know if I'm full of it or not.