Photo Credit: Charles Deluvio
Spotify’s feature list has grown long over the course of the last few years, but one immutable truth remains — the shuffle button sucks at shuffling. Users have noticed the shuffle button has gotten increasingly bad in the last few weeks, recycling the same songs over and over.
The lack of shuffle on Spotify has become something of a meme on the internet in music communities. “I have a single playlist of 3,000 songs and every time I use [shuffle], it keeps trying to play at least one song from a group of maybe 50 songs that come on constantly,” reads one complaint about the feature.
“It’s past the point of any realistic statistical probability, or even that of a pushy algorithm. I’m starting to think my shuffle is earnestly bugged.” Responses to the issue seem to confirm that most people have noticed that Spotify’s shuffle isn’t exactly doing what you’d expect of a shuffle button. Typical behavior of shuffle for a playlist on a hardware device like an iPod is to shuffle through a 3,000-song playlist with no repeats before all 3,000 songs are played.
Someone else speculates that the ‘bug’ seems related to Spotify’s smart shuffle feature, which takes user-generated playlists and injects new music it thinks the user will like. “I have some large playlists that repeatedly shuffle in the exact same order (except the songs inserted by smart shuffle),” one comment about the issue reads. Others seemingly confirm the poor shuffle seems to be related to Spotify’s smart shuffle.
“Smart shuffle is pure garbage and they won’t let me permanently disable it, and I need to go through smart shuffle to get normal shuffle,” reads another disgruntled commenter. Others speculate that there is a difference in shuffle between the app and the desktop version, leading to even more confusion about how shuffle works.
Android Authority created a poll asking Spotify users if they noticed a degraded shuffle performance after noticing all of the social media posts about how bad it has become. With 1,067 responses at the time of writing, 91% of respondents said they’ve noticed that Spotify only plays the same few songs repeatedly. Just 5% of respondents said they believe Spotify reliably surfaces a balanced mix of tracks, while 4% say they don’t use the service.
“There are times I will want to listen to an entire artist’s discography, and so I will play that,” reads one comment. “But Spotify will only play about 50 or so of the hundreds of songs from the artist. It favors their recent releases, and barely plays their older music. I tried this many times over several months and it is always the same. Maybe a different song here and there, but overall it is very selective and biased towards newer and more popular releases over older, less popular tracks.”
One suggestion for the degraded shuffle feature is turning off the ‘Automix’ feature on Spotify. Head into settings and look for Playback Settings -> Automix and toggle the feature off. Automix tends to organize songs based on how well they transition into one another, which can feel less random.
“A shuffle of a 520 track playlist seems to play about 10% of the songs for me. One small local artist repeatedly comes up! So much so that I’m considering deleting her songs from my playlist,” another comment reads. “I recently shared this playlist with someone who didn’t know the artist and they said ‘wow, you really like her. so many songs.’ So Spotify’s shuffle feature was immediately favoring this artists’ tracks too, for a user who had never heard of her, let alone played her music.”
“It makes me wonder, does this small, little known artist get paid a smaller royalty per track compared to better known artists. Is Spotify manipulating the shuffle of my most played playlist purely to minimize royalty expenses? At this stage, that’s what I reckon.”
While that last comment is pure speculation on the commenters’ part, Spotify’s bundling of its Premium offering with audiobooks has certainly manipulated the royalties it owes to music publishers based on those changes.
