Why Spotify Playlists Never Truly Shuffle
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ส.ค. 2024
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sources:
thetab.com/uk/2021/11/17/spot...
angry user: community.spotify.com/t5/Ongo...
the spotify algorithm: engineering.atspotify.com/201...
spotify home algorithm: engineering.atspotify.com/202...
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━CHAPTERS━
00:00 Spotify's Shuffle is Broken
02:30 Shuffling isn't "Random"
03:16 We Don't Want Random Shuffle
04:53 Experimenting
09:26 How the Algorithm Works
12:05 Has The Spotify Algorithm Changed?
12:45 Humans Suck at Probability
13:57 How to Fix the Bad Algorithm
16:40 Conclusion
Why isn't spotify's shuffle feature actually a random shuffle? why is it an algorithm? Why doesn't the algorithm suck???
tags: #spotify - ตลก
Me: you made me listen to [song] 20 times, I don't even like that song!
Spotify: that's impossible, you love that song, you've listened to it 20 times
literally lol
I am in physical pain
perfect comment
parks and rec…?
@@maddiepsimko feels more like a joke from its always sunny
As someone who has over 5000 songs in their Spotify library, I feel this. There are undoubtedly songs I’ve added to it that I never hear and never will. Spotify also loves playing the more recently added songs primarily, so when I hear something added in like 10th grade, I’m taken aback.
This is the problem I have. My liked songs playlist is 1300 songs or so but I swear there is tonnes of songs that it just never plays.
@@CaptainHoratioPugwash I'm only 330 songs deep on my favourites, and I can only loath the idea that I'm not gonna be hearing some of the bangers I put in a year ago just because their oldest in my playlist
Try over 12,000 💀
Spotify’s shuffle algorithm is for sure why I rarely shuffle my Saved Songs playlist though :/
That's why I still download mp3 songs
@@gamermapper no joke, but even other apps do was well, dont use Spotify but i swear the other have this was well even if is just mp3, i deleted just to see if i am crazy but my guess is no
As computer science major I want to make a customizable randomization/shuffle for music. You can add filters and different preferences. Like you don’t want the same artist to appear more than twice in a row, or if you’re sick of hearing one particular song, you can push it to the back of the queue. So that there is an easy way to meet everyone’s desire of what they want shuffle to be.
Plz,plz,plz been thinking about this lately. Yeah idk why huge app/tech companies dont give you near as much customization as id like. Between phones, youtube, music streaming services, etc. I know they are probably cating to the majority in trying to make thier stuff simple and easily accesible but goddamn do i want some degree of more in depth customization when it comes to music rec's. Probably alot of investment motivations in the mix too, like promoting certain artists to get more money or something.
please do that - and also make it ad free /j
You’ve seen how Steve Jobs pitched the iPod shuffle’s smart shuffle? You’ll find it interesting!
The “sh!tification” of Spotify has been my villain arc; the audacity for them to charge me more.
3:21 The truth is, I do really want a truly random shuffle button I want the full 1200 songs in my library to be equally possible
I want more than 1 shuffle types! Bias by mood, key, recency, or even spaced random.
Yesss! Most of the time, to be honest, I like listening to the more regular songs.
But every now and again I want to be surprised and to be hit with some deep cuts.
the algorithm they use to fix the issues with true random only change the likely hood that one sone will come after another, all songs are equally likely to show up
@Tack not true, Three Days Grace songs are much more likely to appear than other songs, stop talking out of your ass
@@14ajencks the current algorithm obviously does additional things. you time stamped the part of the video explaining true random and I was explaining the thing they did to fix it.
can we make this video insanely popular so that spotify sees it and actually fixes this issue
it is a feature not a bug
@@kanalisationerstellen The feature has a bug.
@@kanalisationerstellen The feature is stinky
@@kanalisationerstellen well the feature bugs me
@@kanalisationerstellen the feature is a bug
Spotify has been thoroughly enshittified. Adding features no one asked for trying to apply algorithms to *everything*, implementing multiple recommendation engines, the list goes on.
My favorite is when they started using "vibes" instead of genres, but only sometimes. And then mislabeling all the genres as frequently as possible.
Why does it group "Paper Bag" by Fiona Apple in the same category as "Tornado of Souls" by Megadeth? Classic metal artists, the big four: Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer, and Fiona Apple.
Clearly AI ru(i)ns everything on the sorting of music there.
but like.. we did ask for it bc we didn't like true random shuffle tho
They recently put seeing lyrics behind a paywall. Yeah no I'm gonna stick to physical media now
Spotify keeps pushing some songs that i've grown tired off in my face via my dj and radios and daily lists and mixes and it's like they're just putting it into rotation without my permission and now I hate that song that I used to love
great video! also that miranda cosgrove edit was hilarious.
i can't believe 2014 was 13 yrs ago😢😭😭😭
wow its danny gonzalez
love you, dad
@@emmalonon8560 WHAT
OMG ITS NINJA! /j
I've complained about Spotify shuffle for more years than I can count at this point. Most of my playlists are just full albums combined, and every time I shuffle it groups the albums together, clearly based on time since last listened to, whether it thinks it's my favorite, popularity, etc. Always hated it.
YEs thank you!! I listen to my liked songs and out of 1000+ songs it always plays the same ones!!
Are you really old or can you not count high?
@@tannerakers7276 considering spotify was founded 16 years ago, I'd say its the latter
@@tannerakers7276 it's an expression lmao
Currently using Spotify myself and another thing that bothers me is when you go to “radio”. It’s just a playlist lmao
"2014 was 13 years ago" 11:05
Did I miss a joke or something?
I was trying to see if anyone else saw this !
She's doing the "feel old yet?" joke again but more absurd - Miranda Cosgrove also didn't age 40 years since Gabi showed her pic the first time!
dummy
In 3 years, this will become a fact
@@tripleaxel7209 same!
Well, riddle me this: I don't have spotify premium, so on mobile devices I can only listen to shuffle.
I got a playlist for when I drive (the only time I rly listen to music) and I have realised: When the playlist ends and I restart it, it is mirrored. At least the first 10 songs are the exact same as the last ten songs the last time this playlist played in the exact same order just reversed.
I realised this during a drive that took me 6 hours and my playlist lasts for a little over 2 hours. I drove that way there and back again so 12 hours of music, roughly 5-6 repetitions of the playlist. Each time (save for the first 1-2 - I can't say about that with certainty) it was the same result: Last 10 songs were: A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,L and then the first tem songs would be without fail L,I,H,G,F,E,D,C,B,A.
Weirdly, free Spotify does shuffle in a totally different way than premium Spotify.
That's not how the alphabet goes.
Why did you replace J with L
The worst thing is that even when I let my "shuffled" playlist go on for long... the same songs start repeating, like I've had a single song repeat 4 times in the span of 3 hours. It fixates on like maybe 40 songs and cycles mostly through them, occasionally throwing in a different one. I should be able to listen to the entirety of my 17h playlist on shuffle without hearing a single thing twice.
exactly, it’s just the worst. i hit shuffle so that i can listen to ALL of the songs in just a different order! so give me all of them!
Maybe you skipped some songs? Cause the "shuffle" reshuffles when you skip, therefore the other songs that already played will play again. Atleast, that's from what I observed. I have a long 4 hour playlist (not that long compared to others, but you get the point, I mean, 4hour no skip?) that I didn't skip any song, and they all played exactly once, after the end of the playlist, some other truly random song that I don't know of will play.
Sometimes I've even had the playlist end and start playing recommended songs before I hear every song in the list. Like, I'd be listening to my playlist while playing a game, never reopen the window (so there's no way I could've skipped any by accident), and suddenly the playlist will either end or start replaying songs I've already heard (or both, never getting to the ones I haven't heard). It's also a playlist that's only a couple hours long, so I can get through it all in one day. I would much prefer hearing _every song_ exactly once before the playlist ends, tyvm
Literally doesn't get better no matter how long the playlist is. Have an over 70 hour playlist. I blow a gasket regularly over how often a couple of songs will repeat on the playlist in the span of a few hours
my spotify was never shuffled enough because i would literally think of the next song playing and it would play because of how many times it would repeat
My personal solution for this issue is having a playlist called "Almost overplayed", and whenever a song in my main playlist gets played way too often, I get it in there and out of my main playlist. And when I'm not sick of it anymore, I can still put it back.
It's not a great solution, but maybe some advice for y'all.
That's actually smart it keeps you from getting sick of a song. I might try that thanks :D
I’m just gonna borrow this, thank you :,D
I just make a new playlist whenever i feel kinda annoyed with the songs there, which gives me like 10-15 playlists of 20-35 songs each
omg thank you this is a wonderful solution. I have an almost 900 song playlist that I used to listen to constantly, not in shuffle just the top 20 at the top, but after a couple months I got so tired of it. I made a whole new playlist with none of the same songs which currently has 134 tracks, but I’m starting to get sick of that one, too. This solution with definitely work well, I hate not being able to listen to masterpiece songs just because I’ve heard them one too many times. :)
That sounds sad. Getting sick of the song to begin with it is the harm and it's like it's already done. But at least you won't be getting sicker and can recover from it, it's smart.
Being forced to get sick of a song is tragic.
Ok, I think I worked out what the problem is (comp sci guy here btw), and it is because Spotify is doing exactly what you suggested they should do. I think what is happening is that Spotify is choosing a song at random and then going forward in an intelligent way based on that.
If you think through the consequences of that, it makes total sense of the experiment you showed by bytebodger. It is totally reasonable that in their 50 attempts, they never once got their test song as the first song on the list. In which case, the smart system begins to choose songs that have a similar tone, and what do you know, all the other songs have all the same genre and bpm. So, by choosing a random song, and then playing similar songs, you would expect a 99% chance that the odd one out ends up at the end of the playlist.
Your own experiments were a little unusual, but probably not enough to be statistically significant, but they are proabably a better approximation of the experience that everyone is complaining about. Imagine that you have a playlist containing 3 sets of related songs. The first set contains like 6 songs, the second set contains 3 songs, and the third is just a single song. If you were to shuffle this playlist, 60% of the time, you would end up with some sequence songs from the first set, 30% of the time, and only 10% of the time would the unique song end up near the front of the que.
You could do an experiment to prove this. Create a playlist with say, 9 copies of the same song, and one song that is totally different from the rest. Then shuffle it, like a lot, and just note down the position of the unique song. You will probably find that it is in 1st position at more or less exactly 10% of the time. However, if you look at how often it is in 2nd position (and probably the other high positions), it will probably be way less than 10%.
this is actually really good, have you tried it?
Gabi! My TH-cam algorithm has been terrible lately. It keeps showing me the same videos I'm not interested in watching and showing me the same videos I've already watched. I feel like that could be a great next project
My playlist has 427 songs and it's soooo frustrating that some play more often than others. Part of the point of having a long playlist is having a wide variety of stuff to listen to!
@Shadow lol same here with around 1010 songs
And it never really plays the whole playlist, it starts again before going through all the songs
5000, you puny mortals cannot begin to imagine my power... I mean ,uh, yeah same issue...
@@jameskilgour387 Dam, and i was proud of my 70 songs 😔
Idk how many songs my playlist is but its over 110hours long and omg same
My Spotify theory has always been that the songs you've listened to more recently play more often due to the fact that they are cached in the app memory, therefore takes less data to play as opposed to a song you've never heard or haven't listened to in a while (at least in non downloaded playlists). A simple cache clear usually makes my shuffle feel more random.
The thing is, it happen in my different devices with the same acc
definitely a placebo
this is very much how it works - i've scrolled to the bottom of a playlist before (3000 song playlist) on the PC version and if i press play/shuffle while viewing the bottom, it will only play the nearest 100(or so) songs to these songs. start from the top? only play the nearest 100(or so) songs in the top. definitely a thing, they just don't wanna admit they've got bad developers
@@jamesbiggs4421 that doesn't necessarily mean they are bad developers. Maybe they weighed which is more obvious; lag and delay everytime you shuffle, or a less random shuffle, and figured people would be less likely to notice the latter.
I have a playlist with over 4K songs on. It's definitely different whenever I play it. However, I've noticed that it tends to play songs that are in certain 'moods'. So if it starts off with ballads, then it tends to play a lot of ballad-y/slower songs. If it starts out energetic, then it stays energetic, etc.
5:28 I’m sorry but her bringing up angel bests just brought back SOOO MANY MEMORIES OMGGG
11:22 you said 2014 was 13 years ago and the video was released in 2023 I think I’m a time traveler
Someone else noticed
Bandaid solution: instead of hitting shuffle on your playlist, pick a song you'd like to listen to and only then set the mode to shuffle.
Great video
same thought
this works, I do it as well.
This must be why I never encountered this problem lol
yep from my experience spotify is great at suggesting more songs based on one individual single.
I feel like it helps just a little and then the same songs are playing back to back again :(
I have a giant playlist with wildly different genres that I regularly listen to and here’s some of the main observations I’ve made with it
1. Spotify prioritizes the most recently added songs to a playlist
2. Spotify will do its best to group songs with similar genres before moving onto another genre
3. Spotify will avoid songs that do not fit into the prominent genres of the playlist
4. It will prioritize genres that you have recently listened to. It’s also good to mention that it doesn’t count a song as listened to if you skip if before 30 seconds
I agree with the last one, I don't get much variety in shuffle from 5k+ songs if I'm just skipping looking for something I do feel like listening to.
BUT if I just let it play on shuffle on its own without skipping, it'll have a good mix so it's all rlly just leaving it alone to do its thing.
honestly i want to add to this as i feel this is mostly true.
I do feel like it definitely also takes time, and maybe even location into account.
Also the device you're playing on.
I get wildly different shuffles on my phone, PC, and AV setups.
Also i always get chill, or depressing songs around 12-6AM like when i go home from a party for some reason.
Or it play's a different shuffle when i am at work in contrast to when I'm home.
Not sure if this really happens, but i definitely found that time has a big influence on the shuffle in addition to the stated above.
@@Kiritomens I assume it's just because most people's mood decreases during late nights (general biological trend), so they'd be more inclined to listen to chill or sad music at that time which gets picked up by the shuffle algorithm. Interesting stuff to note tho
I know in super late but ya the genre thing hits super hard because my liked songs Playlist is super "diverse" in terms of genre but when I get swancore it plays nothing but swancore for the next 15 skips until it gets to metal or something adjacent. Like fuck where is the lady gaga I have in this Playlist
@Kiritomens I agree that it most likely changes how it shuffles based on the time of day. Granted, I've done no research but my educated guess is that if it can track what time you're listening to certain types of music for Spotify wrapped, it can do so for the shuffle algorithm.
i absolutely adore your videos, the humour and editing style ! you’re amazing
Pro tip for people without premium: you can add every song in one existing playlist to another playlist, so if you make several playlists with the same songs then you can shuffle and play the other playlists instead of using your skips when you aren't in the mood for a certain song. Once you play a full song in the new playlist, the other playlists will no longer continue the song they were on and will reshuffle.
maybe an algorithm that has to pick one song from every artist in the list before using the same artist again would increase the variety of music, since I think most people are actually wanting variety. And the song from each artist is truly random, and the first artist that is picked to play is random. This would prevent getting the same artist several times in a row so that you can hear everything in the playlist. Basically it would go through every artist and pick one song, then randomize the order of artists and pick another song from each artist, with an algorithm that doesnt allow a song to be in the list more than once in a shuffle until every song is played first. Randomizing the order of artists while still doing one song from each artist will help make it less predictable of what artist song will be next while still getting full variety.
I feel like a cool idea would be for it to somehow monitor how far you got in the queue so it knows what songs you didn't get to listen to and can put those ones earlier in the next shuffle.
I think about this all the time! My playlist is incredibly long an so I only ever get through a tiny fraction of it, yet there are songs that tend to pop up over and over. This would help a lot
Literally a feature windows media player has had since like 2003, you can resume a previous list, why is this so hard?
I work in a factory, and use a massive karaoke speaker for music. My 400 song playlist gets the same 15 songs repeated after every break because when I disconnect from the speaker, it clears the queue for some godforsaken reason. Recently I've been shuffling using a third party program, by Steven Aleong. That works a lot better (after he updated it)
Yeah that makes a lot of sense
My 20 year old mp3 player had better shuffle function than Spotify. It would create a shuffled order of my songs and just remember where I had left off when I turned it back on after having turned it off. And Spotify can't even actually shuffle all the songs in a playlist longer than an hour lmao.
I have a playlist with over 1k songs and the amount of songs I forget are in my playlist cause they rarely ever play despite the fact that I listen to music basically everyday is crazy. I would love it if the algorithm worked the way you suggested where it chooses the first song truly randomly and the rest of the queue is based off of that one song.
Same. Have a playlist with thousands of songs. I listen to headphones inside my hardhat under my ear protection almost daily at work for 10-12+ hours, and over the course of the last year I’ve definitely noticed it chooses certain songs and artists much much more then others. Kinda annoying tbh.
@@IrreIephant especially when im trying to diversify the music i’m listening to and all i get are the same ones over and over
or at least add a thing that gives priority to songs it hasnt played in a while. I think most people using shuffle you want that
ok i just wanna know, how long is your playlist? bc goddamn.
@@jocie3512 quite long, i like to listen to a lot of different genres lmao
I don’t know why TH-cam showed me this video today in the morning, but I have a really shitty day in front of me and you really cheered me up and made me ready for it. I love your sense of humor. Subscribed after 20 seconds. Thank you
You're videos seem like there's put so much effort into editing! I'm so impressed and captivated by this and all the impressions, and additionally the topics are interesting! Wow
To me the ultimate goal is to hear all the music within the playlist, so I'd suggest adding a weight factor onto their existing algorithm that keeps building up every time a song isn't listened to ensure that it's eventually forced to play. I think that would create a more even distribution
It would, but also you could make an algorithm that solves the issue of misperceived pattern recognition in true random with an algorithm that doesn’t weight Individual songs to be more likely to get played, just on a set of rules starting at a random seed start point that would help ensure the songs play in a pattern that is unintuitive to the human brain and less likely to get thought of as a pattern. Basically I think what I’m trying to say is any solution to this problem is probably at odds with spotifys intended design. They want specific songs played more for specific reasons, either user retention or bc they can pay less to those artists etc…
The opposite happens. The more complete playthroughs a song has, the more it gets bumped up the list. The songs you're more likely to skip show up less and less
Yes! I add an obscure song I really like and I get recommended the same song I added 2 years ago that I skip every time. They need to prioritize less played songs and not the ones I skip consistently.
This poses some problems from an engineering perspective. For this data to persist indefinitely, it would basically involve adding a new property to every user's instance of every song *for every custom playlist that user has*, that needs to be updated every time that user plays *any* song. We're talking billions and billions of new data points and new operations to update the values of those data points. Spotify needs to store that data perpetually on their servers. For a service with as many users and as much data as Spotify, space and time efficiency is a huge consideration when building any feature.
In computer science a big thing is scalability, which means how different algorithms perform when the amount of data becomes extremely large. We use something called Big O notation to get a rough estimate of the space complexity (amount of data storage space required) and time complexity (amount of operations required) of an algorithm. For the one you suggested, the Big O notation would look something like this: Call # of spotify users "X", call # of custom playlists a particular user has "Y", call each song "Z", and call each play of a song by a particular user "A". The Space complexity would be O(X*Y*Z), and since all of these numbers can be arbitrarily large, the specific values don't matter so we can simplify it to O(N*N*N), or O(N^3). This means that the amount of data storage space required for this feature will scale cubically as the amount of users or songs or playlists increase, which we know they will. Cubic growth is more severe than exponential growth, which is already considered a very poor tradeoff. In other words, it's not scalable. The time complexity is similar - O(X*Y*A) - or O(N^3).
Now, if this data was not sent to spotify's servers but instead cached on the user's device, that would have a similar effect but be much more operationally efficient, as it would not require any new server space. The downside would be that this data would only persist as long as the cache on your device is scheduled to last, which could be anywhere from "however long you have the app open" to "how long its been since you quit the app or restarted your phone" to maybe even longer, like a month. So if your song didnt come up in that time, and the cache expired, the weight would reset to 0.
@@thestever -- Since this is a fix for playing the same handfull of song *every time,* a halflife of a month is plenty. Especially helpful if this value increments when the song is in the next 5 queued songs, so spamming shuffle will eventually cycle through the entire list.
My #1 most played song of the year last year was a song I had literally never searched for, but it kept being picked by the algorithm, making it frequently played, making it picked more often. I really hate how spotify tends to "find out" I like a certain popular song, then proceeds to play it very early in the queue literally every single time I shuffle, making me so sick of the song I can't stand it anymore.
Great video!
i know this isn't related to the video but seeing this comment reminded me that one of the songs on my spotify wrapped playlist last year was a video. it was like a tiktok by a member of imagine dragons that i had literally never seen before. how did that happen? why is this even on spotify and why was it on my wrapped?
@@loquita-lostwave That's just how the Wrapped playlist works. They'll put a short video of most of your Top 5 or something Artists thanking you for listening to their song on the playlist.
@@Shori948 it makes sense when you put it like that. i just thought it was super weird since i'd never seen it before
Click skip and then remove it from your playlist
I work as a sound guy on shows, concerts, etc and my spotify wrapped is always so fucked up with random songs that I play as background music when I'm at work. I genuinely didn't even recognize 3 of my top 5 most played songs from 2021 lol
Great video essay by the way! The editing and production kept me entertained all the way!
i mean, i kinda already thought of this before because countless times have i predicted the next song in a playlist with 75+ songs
I desperately want a “true random” option because every time I shuffle a playlist for the 10th time and it plays in a distinct order to “space things out” better, I can’t help but think “Man, that’s statistically unlikely to happen more than once, right?”
Oh that's a great point, maybe certain songs "fit" better near the top. You've got something here
It happens to me too with 3 songs: it's always "Sidewalks" from The Weekend then "Battlefield Classic Theme" from the BF1 soundtrack and then it just gives me "Nobody Told Me About ID" from the original Doom Soundtrack. Idk Spotify thinks I like soundtracks
@@thewerepyreking I sure hope my Spotify doesn't think that The Weekend and BF1 Soundtrack and Doom Soundtrack fit well together 🥲🤣
I have weird tastes yes, but like wtf
I want spotify to see "Hmm this playlist is full of prog rock and 90s techno" and recommend either more of both or music that fills qualities of both. AS of now it seems to get fixated on either or and wont play Tangerine Dream or Genesis if its already shuffling Aphex Twin or FSOL
The single worst update on Spotify is when they changed it so that i can't just double click on the playlist to reshuffle i have to play a different playlist first , can you imagine that
double click the shuffle icon
@@nexxara4572 on phone it automatically shuffles you dont have a choice
you can actually
@@nexxara4572no cause then it pauses it
@@nexxara4572 that doesn't change the starting song, and yes that matters.
I’m watching one of your older videos and congrats your closer to a million now then the 200k you were pushing for when this video was released.
ive never got the whole "we dont want truly random stuff" yes i do!! thats why i click shuffle in the first place!! because i assume im gonna get a *truly random* set of music from my playlists all hundreds of songs long!!
I love when Spotify finishes my playlist and makes a radio based on it and it always starts with a song from my playlist and proceeds then to play the exact same songs in this radio… every single time
i hear a lot of albums and i just noticed that in the past month i got the same radio "based on" different albums... with different styles...
Radio is only good when playlists are small. Once you grow your playlist, radio just feeds you your playlist
@@xzeuiime and my 146 hour long playlist 💀💅
@@xzeuii who ever has small play lists at this point unless they are super new tho, maybe they should tweak it then
It seems like every single radio I get starts with Seven Nation Army, no matter what playlist I start with.
As a software engineer, the spotify shuffle feature infuriates me to no end because it always randomizes the same order until you change the playlist and it would be SO EASY to just randomize the list every time you hit shuffle or finish one full loop
Well, if you are listening to a playlist and you hit the shuffle toggle button e actually does shuffle again the playlist. I usually do that when I want certain song to come after the one I'm listening to. (but also, MY playlists are 50 songs maximum, I don't see a reason to have like 1k songs in a list)
yeah I end up adding a song occasionally to force the shuffle to change but then eventually I end up w the problem of several hundred songs that I barely get the chance to hear, so then I have to create a new playlist again :(
you just KNOW they didn't seed their RNG properly
@@GustavoFernandesKing yeah i have a playlist with 1k+ songs which makes the problem way more noticeable (ik its weird don’t judge i like it that way😭)
@@GustavoFernandesKing I just use my like playlist because I don't want to spend the time and energy organizing it all. So it's very noticeable with 1k plus playlists because I hear the same damn songs and have to spend an eternity skipping to find a song I hadn't listened to in the past month.
Adding "reddit" to the search is the most relatable thing ive heard all day 😭
This is the best ad for a little gadget I've ever seen, congrats, I want one now XD
Something I’ve noticed nearly constantly over the last few years that I’ve spent building a massive playlist is that it UNDENIABLY preferences recently added songs. In a playlist I’ve had since 2016, if I add ten songs today, I’ll likely hear 3-4 of those 10 songs immediately upon shuffling regardless of the other 370 songs in the playlist.
Either way, it’s still nowhere near as bad as shuffling a TH-cam playlist, which (by my measurement) seems to grab one song and then continue to “shuffle” based on grabbing one from a +/- 10 adjacent videos, and continuing off that, so you’re never really getting things from all across the playlist.
For sure, I added Midnights last Friday while I was listening to music and like 2 songs later Lavender Haze played from Midnights
For me it never plays any of my recently added songs and just plays a handful of the old ones over and over again
Amazon music does the same thing!!!
Wait what? My youtube playlists always seem to shuffle fairly well.
yes! and also i find on a huge playlist, it is pretty mjuch just 10-15% of the songs ONLY? like it repeats almost exactly within an hour. i have one of those huge 14hr long playlists and there are definitely artists it Never touches on. then, once in a blue moon, it will throw in a new (aka not previously played) song, and yet i still end the year with "we didn't start the fire" at the top of my spotify wrapped even though i skipped it every single time it was given to me :| like maybe the point of the damn playlist is that i want to listen to All the songs on there
I've always wanted an option that keeps track of whatever songs you've already heard from the playlist, prioritising in the shuffle songs you haven't heard as much until you've heard everything and then it shuffles back
Same.
This is so fucking smart
This is the way.
That would be perfect
This is exactly what I’ve thought about, and I notice this with TH-cam playlists too. Like, y’all, if I’ve got the song in my playlist, it’s because I want to listen to it, and if I’ve got a playlist of over 100 songs, it’s because I want some variety. If I wanted to listen to the same twenty songs every time I pulled up the playlist, I would just have those 20 songs in it
Easy, just add a function to the algorithm that looks at how long its been since a song has been played, so songs you haven't heard in a long time have a higher chance of being played.
Balance that with recently added songs, favourites, and keeping a consistent energy to the song list and that's about all I would want.
Even a deterministic set might be better than something that "feels random", like if a random playlist was guaranteed to be 15% favourites, 15% recently added, 30% least played, and 40% "random", that might fool more people into believing it's truly random, since you're guaranteed to get a bit of everything.
The deepcuts in this video..
Death note soundtrack and Ashniko.. eclectic AF and I am here for it! Much love and respect Gabi! 🙏🏼
The shuffle algorithm also fails miserably for very large playlists. It will only do about 200 songs and they actually need to be close to the starting song in the list. I always pick a song way down in the list to start the shuffle. It definitely helps.
That's what I do too! I'll either scroll to a random spot and start the shuffle, or find one song in particular that i want to start with. It does help but there are still a lot of songs that i realize rarely ever come up...
I do this too. But most of the time it only helps for a few songs before the "shuffle" falls back into old habits.
I wish I could but I won’t pay for Spotify premium no matter how inconvenient the app is without it
there are multiple songs I’ve went from liking to having to remove them from the playlist because Spotify would constantly make it top 5 every single time I shuffled without fail. 😑
couldn't relate more to a comment, this hit me like a train and it's not even that deep
EXACTLY!! i’ve had so many songs i’ve liked in the past that i took out because of how repetitive it was getting.
Fr like I used to love Wannabe by Spice girls but now when I hear it, it makes me sick
@@AbrahamC61682 similar experience, i used to love listening to umbrella by rihanna but nowadays i just press skip with a scrunched up face. it's still a good song to me, just not something i wanna stick on my favs playlist nowadays.
Your English is good
Sometimes, if you listened to your liked songs, the something else and come back to liked songs it will play the exact same order again.
i love the solution you came to, it is so smart
Several software dev groups have come to the same realization. Making a "truly" random shuffle is easy, but customers always complain that it doesn't play the songs they want it to when they press the shuffle button. My preferred shuffle is the random-with-memory design which selects randomly except it won't play a song again if it was one of the last X number of songs to be played. I think Winamp used that back in the day.
Yes! I have a youtube-knockoff that'll shuffle the entire album/playlist at once so you'll listen to every song before you hear a repeat. That's my personal favorite method.
@@emackenzie What app is this? I really need to find a better TH-cam playlist shuffler, I've got a 3k+ playlist that TH-cam can't shuffle for it's life! Currently, the best one I could find was a website on the browser, but it wouldn't play in the browser and would play videos which I didn't want to load due to using my data.
This is literally how spotify shuffle currently works
@@mattcollins13 except it’s actually not
Honestly this makes me wonder if some bigger artists have deals with Spotify to promote their music more, and one way Spotify does this would be through having them come up more on shuffling.
This is exactly how placements work
that's definitely true on the playlists Spotify makes themselves as far as I can tell, not sure if the same thing applies to playlists users make
@@soph13s same thing applies. I promise if your playlist has a good number of listeners, there’s folks paying to be there haha
yeah pretty sure people like harry styles were known for this.
I think it's still illegal for radio stations to do, but there probanly isn't a law against it for streaming.
I love the way you edit this
As someone with almost 10k liked songs and 1k Playlists i feel this a lot. The vast majority of songs that spotify plays are songs that I listened on repeat in the past. The last couple hundred songs i added are played the vast majority of the time. It is sooo anoyying!!! I wish we could have a true shuffle! If it dors indeed pick a song at random, it likes to stay within the range of +- 10 songs. It feels so weird.
Pro tip: playing without shuffle, sorting your faves by song name or date added will feel more random
i don't care about "vibe" or "atmosphere" and i usually struggle a lot with choosing a certain playlist to listen to. i just want ALL of my favourite music in 1 place in a completely truely random order, so that i can decide in the moment if i want to listen to that specific song or not. spotify please make a true random option 😭
Fr😭
True random means you will hear a song multiple times in a row though
@@teeweezeven spotify shuffles once into a queue, not each time you play a song. like shuffling a deck of cards, not rolling dice.
@@teeweezeven could.
Yessss! I don't really care if the same artist shows up 10 times in a row in true random, as long as it's not just my most listened songs or whatever based off of an algorithm. I want variety!
I also feel like Spotify doesn't register skipped songs, only songs that started to play. The playlists it creates with my favorite songs always contain random stuff that kept coming on on shuffle and I kept skipping. It's like someone is offering you cake and you keep rejecting and they'll always be like "But you love cake, it's constantly offered to you after all!"
I was trying to find a specific classical song a couple of weeks back and spent like 20 minutes skipping through maybe a hundred songs. Now Spotify thinks I really love classical music and won't stop recommending it to me.
From what I'm aware, Spotify counts a play after 15 seconds. So, if you don't skip within 15 seconds, it definitely counts as a play and not skip.
@@Agent34e I've had it count a play after less than that, songs show up in my "on repeat" that I definitely listened to once then skipped the next time it came up on shuffle🙃
It’s like when grandma says “Ooh, I really like [insert chocolate of your choice]!” and everyone and their mom gifts her [insert chocolate of your choice] on her birthday for the next 20 years
I think it knows that people like familiarity. If the playlist starts with something that u like and know its got u hooked
this is the only reason I use TH-cam Music. If I shuffle the playlist, it literally shuffles the playlist. And I can reshuffle it at any time, just by hitting a button
I keep saying that spotify should have an option to view how many times youve played a certain song. That way you can just order that from least to most and allow for your playlist to get an even amount of love.
this is a fantastic idea!!!
They just don't want you to do things like that
@@hiphopheaven but itunes has that so why not spotify
while that's a good theory, adding new songs to a playlist would totally overpower the system
you could always use spotistats... spotify wont introduce it, cause then they wouldn't be able to do spotify wrapped (or would, but it wouldn't be as big of a deal)
I usually only play from my 'liked songs' (a playlist of 2,000+ songs).
There is always a point around 50-100 songs in where it just picks up at the start of the 'shuffle' and replays those same songs in the *exact* same order it did previously. It usually also only plays the same three artists, and also seems to play songs released in the same 'era' back to back to back. Whatever the Spotify shuffling algorithm is, its not great :')
Yes, this is what I've found as well. I raised the issue years ago and was told "it's random, it could happen." But the same songs appearing in the same order multiple times out of a playlist of thousands of songs isn't random. Clearly, it's a touchy topic for them with their listeners and not something they really want to deal with. Thanks for the video and all the comments. There's a real comfort in not feeling crazy :P (or feeling crazy together with a bunch of other folks)
the same thing happens to me!! i usually shuffle my liked songs as well (usually 200-300 songs because i get tired of songs relatively easily) and resume playing from the same place whenever i want to listen to music. then suddenly I'll think of a song that I haven't heard in a while and realize "oh, i've been listening to the same 20 songs for the last three days." what's interesting is that sometimes it'll be a song that i know i listen to a lot (when im actively choosing what to listen to), so i know they're not selecting the songs based on what i like the most. from your numbers and mine it seems like it'll give you a selection of VERY roughly 0.25% - 0.5% of the playlist to constantly loop so maybe i shouldn't unlike songs so much since it gives me an ever shorter list of songs to listen to when i shuffle. so especially for me, i truly do want a random selection of songs because they're all ones that i like!! i take the time to remove songs that im tired of hearing but it seems like it only hurts me :(
I just noticed how bad it is as I'm usually adding songs regularly to my playlist so the not shuffle shuffle does change as I'm adding more songs to the shufflable list. My playlist has over 1200 songs in it, I should hear more than 50 of them.
yeah its real annoying. i wanna truly have a radmon mix of the 15500 songs i have liked
Yeah I have the same thing. It will also loop these few songs infinitely in the same order, the only way to break the loop is clicking on a different song. And than also in different loops some songs occur very often and some nearly never
I wish Spotify had an option where you could choose songs you want it to prioritize. I feel like I never hear some of my favorite songs that I wouldn't mind listening to a few times in a day.
What we really want is remove the other shuffle, the one that adds more songs. Replace it with: a truly random shuffle, and an improved shuffle that doesn't always show you the same 20 songs but isn't totally random
You know what I really want? I want my least listened to songs to play first and my most skipped songs to play last. I also want true random.
I can see why that can get really annoying without Premium. There was a song from an album that just didn’t play at all when I was shuffling it in a playlist for like a month.
bro that palak paneer pronunciation hurt my soul😭
what’s that little instrument you’ve been playing with!? it’s super cool and i love the implementation into the transitions. great work gabi
Being a bit of a stats nerd, I wanted to try and get some more reliable info on this. So I took my favorite playlist (that contains 549 songs) and used the spotify web API to start a random play of it 3001 times (I wanted to do it 3000 times but mistakes were made). For each shuffle, I looked at the currently playing song and the queue (that contained 20 songs) and stored the fact that they were played + a score that goes from 21 to 1 depending on their position in the queue (21 being the best score for the first song in the queue). I put everything inside a csv and discovered some interesting things:
1. There are 8 songs that were never played. I checked using a different user and even a different playlist, theses songs are actually never played in the top 21 of a shuffle. If it was fully random, there would be about 10^-49% chance for a song to never be picked.
2. 4 songs are played more than 150 times, which would have a 0.075% probability to occur for each of them if it was fully random.
3. 3 songs are played less than 90 times (the least being 83). For each of them it would 0.86% probability if fully random.
4. Looking at the average ranking of the songs when they are played, there is a clear tendency for some songs to be played earlier in the playlist. This tendency is totally uncorrelated to the number of times the song is played.
5. In fact, I could not find a single correlation between the number of time a song is played and the other information I stored (popularity, song being marked as explicit, date it was added to the playlist). The only thing might be with the artist but it is not really clear, I would need to explore this further.
I tried to share the whole data but it seems I can't put links in comments.
EDIT: Exploring the artist thing, it seems that there is no compensation for artists that are less present in the playlist. It means that having only one song from an artist doesn't mean I will hear it over and over to compensate for the fact that there is other artists I have more than 30 songs of. Knowing that, there are clearly artists that are more prevalent than others. Some are played more than 130 times (per song of them in my playlist) while others are under 90. I have however no explanation as to why some artists are played a lot and others are not.
EDIT2: I also can't find any clear correlation between a song being in my top listened songs (be it short term or long term) and it being played a lot in my playlist. It seems the algorithm is much more obscure than that.
EDIT3: There also seems to be no correlation between a song being played a lot and its spotify-computed features (see "Get Track's Audio Features " in their web API reference).
EDIT 4: auto mix was turned off.
I got about 70% of this information bit thank you for your service, also this is kinda hot
thanks for doing this
this is so cool! and weird that you couldn’t find any correlation. i switched from spotify a while ago but back when i used it i sometimes felt like it would literally read my mind before clicking shuffle. more often than not it would play the exact song i was thinking of. i wonder if ad tracking might have anything to do with that? like in the way you have a conversation about babies or check a website or two about it and you’ll start realizing you’re getting ads specifically about baby items.
I'm sorry this is actually so interesting and informative. But I had to make multiple attempts to read it as "wanted to do 3000 but mistakes were made" had me cackling each time. I can just imagine that someone somewhere has to have made the same type of mistake during like a legit scientific research trial.
"We actually had 100 people in the control group for this experiment, but two of them wore the same jacket that day so intern steve thought they were the same person. Hence why it says 99"
"Yeah during testing of this new brand of cheese, one person failed to mention their lactose intolerance; so that one "it gave me diarrhea" review will haunt the company forever. Sorry"
"We were supposed to monitor the aggression level between this group of 4 male toads over a longer period of time, but one of the toads were actually female. So now we have many toads."
That is bizarre, especially the 8 songs never played
Maybe Spotify has some sort of ‘naughty list’ of songs they won’t play unless you specifically select it? Like how YT has vids you can’t find through the search feature or recommended.
Though more likely it’s just Spotify having a breakdown
2014 was 13 years ago had me almost in tears. I didn’t quick math quickly enough and was like “damn wow” at first.
I think it was actually around 8 years ago
@@Tiusity yeah, they know
I knew it was wrong because I’m 13 and I was born in 2009 and was well alive in 2014 😂
I was like…. 14->2023 🤨 that’s 9 😂
even if this was by accident it’s so ironic that she‘s praising her math skills but then makes a simple mistake 😂😭
That Monterey Bay Aquarium jellyfish livecam you zoomed in on at 7:56 is one of my favorite things on TH-cam 😂 Its very chill and kinda psychedelic-looking with relaxing music. I like to put it on in the background sometimes like a lava lamp with tunes. It might seem like a random rec, but i personally love it 😆
Here in 2024 and 2014 is still not 13 years ago. Just figured I'd check in.
It's so much worse when you're using the free spotify too because they'll also add in random songs you didn't add to the playlist to "introduce you to new music"...ie, annoy you into paying for premium.
they only do that if you have less than 15 songs on a playlist
YEAH and on mobile you can’t not shuffle a playlist, it’s terrible
It means you can’t choose to listen to just one song too cause it’ll choose one million other songs and play those instead-
Plus the limited skips - -
Omg I hate that so much 😭
Spotify was one of the most hostile user experience I had to deal with in a long time for this reason and many others, so like. Apple Music isn’t better necessarily but Jesus it’s better than Spotify, especially when you don’t pay
@@aaronburrwaitsforit I have 300+ songs in my playlist and they still do that to me
they should just give you the option to shuffle algorithmically or truly randomly. the way it works currently they're basically just turning it into a radio station. i appreciate that things will sound good together in the shuffle but sometimes i just wanna hear today's pop music next to oingo boingo because it's funny.
Thankfully, I have Spotify premium so I can skip as much as possible. What I do is I shuffle twice before playing my songs, I do not put the playlist on repeat (my playlist - My liked songs - of 300+ songs) and then I play it til the end or until I get bored and do the process again either on the same playlist or on a different playlist :)
I think it is based on how many times you've heard the song.
I once fell asleep while having a song on repeat the whole night and then the next day. It became my #1 most listened song ever to this day, and even to this day even though that was months ago, whenever i play anything remotely related to that one song, it plays it. it's always among the first 3 songs to appear. it's infuriating.
Yeah. I love the track "Synthesize Me" and i listened more than 400 times. And every time I listen to a track close to genre (like ebm, futurepop oe synthpop) and that song ALWAYS (or almost always) plays first and doesn't matter what artist, i need to listen to "start the play" against my will
I had made an over 5000 song playlist on my spotify account, and I think over the course of six months I heard the same 50-100 songs over and over. Most of the time it'd just play the first 3 songs. I even would scroll down and pick a song I hadn't heard in a while, then press shuffle. The damn thing would circle back to a song I had heard the last time I played it.
I gave up on that dream of having an extensive,exhaustive list of my favorite songs to hear at any time, it actually killed my enthusiasm for certain songs because I had heard them so much.
Thankfully the "New Discoveries for Me" playlist is pretty good at giving me something I've never heard and want to add to my liked list, but I'm still bummed that I can't just take a top [insert an extreme number of songs] and slowly weed out songs I am rarely in the mood for, because the algorithm seems to favor my most listened to, which is typically the first 10-30 songs on the list, but only because it picked them in the first place.
It's like a feedback loop, Spotify regards my top 10 as my top 10 because they happened to be the first songs I picked, but even as I'm expanding my tracklist it loops back to those because, unless I start listening to a song on repeat over a hundred times(which after that I'm kinda done listening to it for a while), it'll just keep looping back to my most listened.
Exactly !! My Spotify wrapped is always completely wrong because it counts the songs it plays on shuffle! I don't even like the songs om my wrapped any more!
I think it's so they can sell subs. You can only skip a couple of songs until you're bombarded with ads. So to get the best experience you think you gotta pay and Spotify isn't going to refuse money.
@@TheRealRedHood That's possible, but I also have Premium and it still does this stuff, it's not like they use different algorithms for free and premium members, the only difference is that you don't get ads.
@@biggrayalien4791 They don't. And that's ultimately what it. We pay for a service that could be provided for no extra charge. I also pay for TH-cam premium all to get rid of ads. The internet really is cable at this point.
I switched from apple music to Spotify about a year ago and I have had so many annoyances with Spotify. There is no way to shuffle all 'downloaded' songs, no way to shuffle the albums section and have it play albums through, no more songs tab where you can see a long list of all the songs you have saved to your library but not necessarily 'liked', and the shuffle has always been horrible. Really off-putting in terms of listening to a bunch of old music! I had 12000 songs on my apple music account saved and I just find it a pain to add songs at a similar rate on Spotify because there is no way to keep them in storage. You have to add them to a playlist and never hear the majority of them and it is very annoying.
I used to think this was just a case of me being unable to adapt to the new platform but after a year and a bit I feel like my grievances have a warranted cause.
The non-random random isn't really my biggest gripe about it at the moment though. I'm more frustrated with it replaying the last 20 shuffled songs in exact order all the time even though my playlist is 1100 songs long. I'll be elbows deep in a car at work and all of a sudden I'm like "I just heard these same 3 songs play in that order like 45 minutes ago" and it pisses me off cause then I gotta take out my phone and restart and reshuffle the playlist hoping it'll play normally instead of repeating again.
And sometimes when I start playing on my bluetooth speaker after playing on my car or something it'll start playing some new playlist "Based on (insert last played song here)" even though the playlist I had on was nowhere near finished.
Just let me truly randomize my playlist and listen to it end to end please, Spotify. It's literally the easiest option for you to code for me and yet you won't let me have it
THANK YOU!! That stuff annoys me SO much istg
Yep, my playlist is almost 1,900 songs, and the same thing happens. The same 20 in the same order day in and day out, and then I move from the car to the house and my echos play one song I was listening to, then a song I don't like and know isn't on my playlist, only for me to find it's opened a completely different playlist that I didn't ask for or want.
It sucks so bad, especially because I like older music, so while 90% of my playlist is older than me, I get 75% new pop and rap when it's only a very small portion of what I listen to. Like, Spotify, just let me listen to Black Sabbath and Chopin. Playing Doja Cat to me every day every 5 minutes is NOT going to make me download more new music, it's just not.
So your telling me you want the shuffle button to shuffle your playlist into a unique order that you've never heard before?
Fucking loonatic over here.
Someone call the mental ward.
You can go into settings and turn off the setting that turns on another random playlist
@@arielpennertz but that's not my big problem. The problem is that it restarts the SAME playlist like 30 songs in and will just loop it until I change to another playlist
I know this is a year old, but I noticed that if I chose a different song in the playlist and shuffled, it would be different, I also noticed that if you shuffle and it hits that song, the shuffle would be near identical to whether I went to that song and started the queue there. I know this isn't a solution for everyone but what I started doing was using my Likes playlist as a pseudo quick playlist and I just play them in order every time. Something about the control of the order of the songs is nice to me. I usually just play my playlists in order anyways, that way I can scroll to different parts and just enjoy the songs and know what comes next (I know this is a tangent), but yeah I've noticed they've made improvements and that's nice but if just grown to live with whatever their shuffle is. I don't particularly mind if a group of the same artist plays but I'm probably not exactly the majority here aha, writing all that out has made that kinda clear to me xD
And this is why I listen to music on TH-cam.
1: While there are ads, most are skippable.
2: The shuffle isn't broken.
3: I'm more familiar with TH-cam and have used it for almost my whole life.
4: You can skip songs as much as you want without getting the premium version.
Perhaps a solution is simply to have a feature that allows you to sort a playlist starting with the song you haven't heard the longest.
honestly I think we all have our prefences but that, that would be my ideal.
Or, hear me out.
When I tell the program to randomise a list of songs, it does what I just said instead of something completely fucking different that noone asked for.
As a programmer, this problem makes me want to punch some peers.
@@lolnynyit’d be kinda cool if you could go into settings and change what the shuffle button does for you?
@@sophiathefurbst THIS IS THE BEST SOLUTION
Search small words like to and shuffle
I used to have a MP3 player that was truly random to the point where you could actually get the same song twice in a row. One neat thing that it also did was if you listened to Song A followed by Song B went back to Song A, the next Song wouldn't be Song B again it would be completely random.
Me too! It was on my oldest phone phone though, I can't find it anymore :(
Same!! I noticed as a kid that the cheaper MP3 players would actually shuffle like that where as the name brand and more expensive ones wouldn't.
I’ve had that way too many times on Spotify even thrice in a row before
dude i love my mp3 player its just slow asf
Yay. Get AIMP, guys, best one out there.
"An algorithm brought you this video after all"
Dang it , I fell for it
always feels like spotifys its trying very hardest using my listening time data to stop me from skipping. like youtube with shorts.
My quick and dirty fix is to sort the songs by duration or their title names, and just play them in order without any shuffle mode.
This was a big help. 👏
ok but then you would know which song comes next to the one youre listening to, after doing this quite a few times
What? You're still not on random?
@@angelopizzulli7 seriously Im struggling to see how thats a solution, they basically just said they made the playlist in a different order a few times over because sorting by length is gonna be 1 of 2 options every time
@@Penquinn14 the solution was stated in the video and no one can change my mind
11:11 i genuinely believed 2014 *was* 13 years ago and almost started crying
Same I was so surprised
2014 was 9 years ago, that's when my brother was born and he's 9.
Thank you for making this! Personally I have started playing playlists by song title or by date added for this exact reason. My biggest playlist has 7700 songs and i definitely only hear maybe the same 100-200 songs on a regular basis.
The story of Spotifys random algorithm seems to be a bit confused.
This first started with Apple iPods. People complained the shuffle button wasn’t random when it was.
So then Apple had to develop an algorithm to make it FEEL like it was random.
Spotify just had to do the same thing a few years later.
This vid and the comments are EXACTLY as vindicating as I needed lol. Spotify's shuffle drove me crazy on my 2 hour commute. On a playlist with a hundred artists, I want my fav band to only play occasionally as a treat, but it was obsessed with giving me the same 10 songs from them. also joke's on me for thinking the Trolls song I added would show up rarely as a fun surprise. that shit was nearly EVERY day. it was ridiculous
As a programmer a solution I thought of was keeping track of the order of songs like a weighted system. Songs in the top 10 should get high weights on the first shuffle, the second shuffle should check what songs had higher weights and move them down while smaller weights get moved up, tracking which songs were already listened to or appeared before in the first shuffle. This could be reset at some point. To me, that should make buried tracks rise up on the second shuffle if Spotify deliberately recommends popular or recently added songs.
thats the most obvious solution and im honestly surprised that it doesnt work like that already when the main complaint about true random was getting the same songs over and over again. they literally did not fix the issue lol
funny how the comment above said the exact same thing on far fewer word in a much simpler way lol
If I understood correctly, you're talking about reshuffling the same playlist more than once. But usually, you don't do that you just shuffle once and skip songs. If you reshuffle after listening for a bit you may get the same song again which is very annoying. Your solution doesn't seem to work well for one-time shuffle
LRU data structure plus weighted system
@@_mako no the main complaint with true random was that people kept noticing patterns to the songs being played (that weren’t actually there) bc that’s how our brains work. The “idea” of the algorithm is to have the songs play in a pattern not initiative to us so that it feels more random than true random. Whether the succeeded or not is up debatable.
I use Apple rather than Spotify, but I genuinely want true random.
I do the curation myself, preventing my main playlist having too much of any one artist/genre/mood, because I want to get that mix of everything.
I even describe my playlist as 'mood whiplash' because I want it to go straight from up-beat anime theme to classical to death metal to 80's...
This video is a year old and I still have this issue. It’s to the point I have to go out of my way and play songs it avoids. It tends to help rotate the repeats, but then I have new repeats 😭
I wish they made a true shuffle again. I don't always care so much if one artist has a few songs in a row. Sometimes it might even be nice
exactly
Nobody actually wants true random. They just want variety; neither the current algorithm or true random will accomplish the variety people actually want.
@@deusdamnit Don't tell others what they want or not. As long as each song isn't repeated, random is fine
@@se6369 what matters above all is that the shuffle is different each time and that usually isn't the case for Spotify or YTM
I used to be a math teacher, and specifically used to teach AP Stats, and we talked a lot about true randomness and our perception of random or not... This video makes me SO GOD DAMN HAPPY
Just wanna say ur so pretty
I’m in ap stats and the discussion of randomness is actually so interesting
Except for the coin example. You’re much more likely to have different permutations of equal heads and tails than only heads
So I just discovered you and your great videos a day ago. You have forever gained my loyalty with the mention of Online Songs by blink-182! You are supremely funny and talented!
People forget with random you can TECHNICALLY get the same song 1000 times in a row
my simple diy solution to this was to sort my 1000+ song playlist by title and just play it through without shuffling. i only got artist/album repeat songs one after the other like 3 times, but otherwise it felt random in the exact way i wished shuffle would feel. the only downside/limitation to this is that all my j-pop songs got pushed to the very end of the playlist together, so this tip works best if your playlist only has songs with latin alphabet titles
This is what I do as well, but I have vocaloid in my playlist so I get the same problem
I've found that sorting by lenght of the song works well too (shortest songs first, longer ones at the end)
okay but then you could only play the entire playlist like two or three times before you started being able to predict which song would come next
that's what i do too!
@@olliefischer yeah I tried doing this with my 40 hr playlist that I use for work and it only lasted me 2 weeks before I got bored of hearing the exact same set of songs during a 10 hour period.
I feel so vindicated, I always had a feeling the shuffle feature wasn’t quite as random as it claimed. From my experience it seems to play songs from a mix of both overall popularity and how much it thinks you like said song, creating a vicious cycle as mentioned in the video. I haven’t done any real experimenting, this is just based off of a hunch from someone who uses shuffle a lot
I swear it plays my songs in the same kind of order when I shuffle the same playlist.
This video fills the hole in my head. Now I can hate the shuffle every morning with more understanding while I’m biking to school
i like your type of humor lady, please continue
Not quite the same thing, but I have a story.
I got really sick of one of my playlists because I kept hearing the same songs over and over. Goodbye by Bo Burnham came on, I was out of skips, I REALLY didn’t feel like listening to that song again, so I switched to a different playlist.
Goodbye is the only song those two playlists had in common. Guess what the first song when I hit shuffle on the second playlist was.
BROOO THAT WOULD SUCK
out of skips? i don't use spotify but that sounds insanely dumb to limit the amount of skips
@@SolaceMcfly yeah you need premium to get unlimited skips, it sucks
What absolute fucking genius came up with the idea of "out of skips"?
@@yurisei6732the genius who wants your money. everyone should just buy the songs and listen to them on a music player like god intended.
There is definitely something in the code to pick "bigger" artists more often than smaller artists. I have to remove certain artists entirely when I start new playlists, so I can actually hear the smaller artists in my 6 hours of listening at work. It sucks, because if I want to hear a bigger name's song, I have to add it to the queue myself, then take it out, so it'll hit a smaller artist and not circle around the bigger artist, over and over.
Based on their other autogenerated playlists,
It's likely taking into account that certain artists have a lot of audience overlap.
The more people that listen to an artist, the more people that'll also listen to other artists,
Thus the algorithm might genuinely be selecting artists randomly,
But have the odds skewed in favour of the popular artists as a byproduct of optimisation.
same, I used to love imagine dragons but I had to scrub them from my liked songs because the 6 songs I had from them in the list came up like 2 or 3 times every time I'd drive to work. in my playlist of 1200 songs :/ I just got sick of hearing them.
Your ideia is great, I hope they implement it some day
Your sense of humor is just perfect 😂
Crazy that I am, two years ago I committed myself to discover whether my 20.000 songs Spotify playlist was truly shuffle. I would write down artists and then cross how many times they’d pop up. While other artists never popped up, queens of the Stone Age (one of my favourite bands) songs would appear every other 5-10 times. Also many other of my favourites would appear more often
I’ve listened to a couple songs from Queens of the Stone Age and I really like their sound. Do you have any recommendations out of their discography?
@@FoxGlove8 I think you’d like their second album “songs for the deaf”. It even features Dave grohl playing the drums. Their first album with their name is also gold imo
20k songs????
Holy 20k songs
? they didn't let me put more than 10,000 in one playlist