How Spotify shuffles songs | Hacker News Reader

How Spotify shuffles songs

labs.spotify.com

41 pointsgraghav6 comments

That's an interesting view into the inner workings of my favourite music player. However, as a lot of people also comment on the article:

The main problem with Spotify shuffle is that it plays the same songs over and over while others remain unheard forever. (Even today and this article is from 2014, as another commenter pointed out)

I've wondered this since the days of Rdio(RIP) — is it possible that music services are weighting the probability of songs based on cost-to-them to play?

I play Spotify all day from my library (~10k songs) and it _seems_ like it will always choose a live version of a song (if available) over the album version and it will consistently play 1 specific song from an album every single time (seemingly ignoring the other 10). There's this one Elliott Smith song that will play every_single_time, despite having 5 albums in the library.

Totally agree with the article's comments about perceptions vs realities of "randomness", but it seems that there could be other "business" weightings at work.

One thing that bothers me about the way people look at Spotify as outsiders is they only see it as a US platform.

Through DistroKid, I have a couple years of data indicating that Spotify is actually a music discovery tool in non-US nations a little more than locally. Most of this research corresponds to personal marketing efforts. There are indications I've found that Spotify's efforts outside of the US are likely more beneficial to Artists than might be thought of in a traditional sense.

Glad they posted this kind of "under the hood" rationale. It's a lot like a Director's Commentary on a Film to me, hope you see it the same way. Nothing's perfect, but explaining the logic is nice to see attempted.

Why don't they just do it the way WinAmp did it? You actually produce a single shuffled result of your entire playlist and then just go through it in order. It means that every song will eventually get played, and you won't have repeats until you've fully gone through the playlist.

> you won't have repeats until you've fully gone through the playlist

The question is whether you will have runs of songs by the same musician or band.

Or from the article itself: "At first we didn’t understand what the users were trying to tell us by saying that the shuffling is not random, but then we read the comments more carefully and noticed that some people don’t want the same artist playing two or three times within a short time period."

(2014)

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