You are very much not alone if this is a complaint you’ve had.
TheSpotify Support forumsandRedditare littered with people airing their grievances about the shuffle feature.
It’s clearly not working how people expect it to work.
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Let’s take a look at why that is.
Related:Why Is It Called Spotify?
Flipping a quarter is a good example of this.
Spotify
However, true random can just as easily result in 10 straight heads.
Each time the coin is flipped, there’s a 50/50 chance it will be heads or tails.
That chance doesn’t change depending on the previous coin flip.
The same thing applies tosongs in a playlist.
So, Spotify changed it up.
The next song was already decided at the moment you turned on shuffle mode.
-Spotify.
The name “shuffle” is actually a very accurate description of how it works.
Think of it like shuffling a deck of playing cards.
When you tap the shuffle button on a playlist, all the songs are shuffled into a new order.
This happens every single time you opt for shuffle button.
Spotify generated a new order of songs each time.
More importantly, the artist that appears in the playlist five times is never evenly distributed.
In fact, in two of the shuffles, four out of the five songs were grouped together.
That’s how Spotify shuffle works on a basic level, but again, this is not random.
Spotify stopped using true random in 2014.
Now there’s an algorithm that decides the shuffle.
Related:Streaming Music?
The algorithm has almost certainly been tweaked since then, but it’s surprisingly simple.
First, the algorithm spreads out songs from the same artist.
Generally, they’ll appear every 20-30% of the length of the playlist.
The algorithm also shuffles the songs by the same artist among each other.
This is to prevent songs from the same albums from playing too closely together.
The algorithm itself is quite simple.
Maintaining a feeling of randomness is what really complicates things.
Shuffle has to strike a balance between true randomness and manufactured randomness.
Random Is Hard
There aremore advancedmusic shuffling algorithms out there.
The human brain makes the concept of “random” hard to execute.
If you’re still curious about this topic, check out thisexcellent video by Gabi Belle on YouTube.
