A shuffle that “always irritated” will now seem more human. It’s a balance between statistical randomness and listener intuition.
O Spotify has, among several options, the random. Or famous shuffle, that has existed for decades in other ways of listening to music.
The listener presses the button and the application – or website or program – chooses the songs that will be played next. Randomly. “To luck”, some will say.
This shuffle mode has always been one of the most used features on Spotify. But it was also always one of the features less understood.
Many users have always complained that they were always listening to the same songs; or they saw a repeating pattern in the list of songs played.
Spotify admits that the random mode has indeed been random. “We used a standard, publicly available randomization method to generate playlists with mathematically correct orders.”
However, after receiving reports from several users, the company found that “statistical randomness does not always translate into perceived randomness”.
Listeners wanted a more varied and less repetitive shuffle. Certain songs or artists seemed to always be chosen, while others were forgotten.
Randomness, by definition, does not guarantee a uniform distribution, but “human expectations do.”
In the same statement, the change is announced: there is now a new random mode called Fewer Repetitions. A fairer and more innovative system. Less repetitions, same randomness.
Now it will look more human. It’s a balance between statistical randomness and intuition of the listener, indicate those responsible.
The new approach generate multiple random sequences (each is a mathematically random version of your playlist), assigns a score of “freshness” for each sequence (the system checks the recent frequency of the songs — both within the playlist in question and across Spotify) and chooses the latest version of random sequences.
Example practical: if today you heard ‘Walk with me to see the planes’ and ‘Birds of a feather’, these two songs are automatically moved down, to the end of the queue; so that others appear higher up.
“We are not changing the mathematics behind the randomness; instead, we are simply choosing the one that sounds most original”, explains Spotify.
Matt Jancer welcomes the change: “Thank God. Spotify’s shuffle mode has always irritated me.”
“I’ve already hit ‘like’ on 7,000 songs and I swear it seems like Spotify only wants me to listen to the same 3% of those songs. There were some artists that I had forgotten were in my playlists because Spotify decided they would never appear as favorites in my queue when I activated shuffle mode”, he describes, in .
From now on, apparently, it will be different.
