Ask HN: Should I expect all songs in my Spotify playlist to be part of shuffle?

2 points

2 years ago

I am a long-time Spotify user and have, over the years, created countless playlists of my favorite songs. When I select a playlist and use the shuffle feature I expect this to mean that this will include ALL the songs in the playlist. But I eventually realized that some songs were NEVER being played regardless of how many times I replayed and re-shuffled the playlist.

After doing some research, I was astonished to discover that this is by design. Apparently, Spotify has decided that it knows better than I do what songs I want to listen to in my playlist. Worse, they don't even tell you they are doing this or give you an option to actually shuffle all songs. They just pick a subset of your playlist and ignore all other songs. They wrote up a hifalutin blog post about this a while back: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ - interesting stuff, but I couldn't care less. If I added a song to a playlist, that means I want it to be included in a shuffle.

So, am I totally wrong here?

Also, for anyone who happens to agree that shuffle should be a "true" shuffle, ie all songs in the playlist, you can add your vote here:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Option-to-have-a-true-shuffle/idi-p/4880594

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