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Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

182 points by simonswords82 5y ago

res0nat0r 5y ago
I have her newest album loaded on the Spotify Windows desktop client right now and shuffle is enabled and working just fine for me. https://i.imgur.com/iiVbmks.png https://i.imgur.com/iiVbmks.png
kyriakos 5y ago
As someone who listens to electronic music for which a lot of albums are collaborations or by mixed tracks by many artists Spotify is completely useless to me. This is because I rarely find any album which has all the tracks available. Most have tracks locked due to licensing issues. It could be partly my location but nonetheless Spotify makes me want to pirate.
jacquesm 5y ago
On the one hand, I get it: Joe Jackson's 'Night and Day' is laid out as a work of art, and to play the album out of order would be very strange, they are even mixed to segue into each other except for the change from the day side to the night side. But as soon as you put only radio edits on your albums and cut them off anyway between tracks that argument gets a lot weaker, and 'power to the user' means that the user gets a say in how their content is consumed. Artists that only release albums are pretty rare. What the article isn't really clear about is whether this goes for all artists or just for Adele, it would be a lot nicer if both Spotify and Adele would respect the fact that streaming isn't vinyl (or CD, for that matter) and that end users, you know, that pesky customer, have other ideas on how to best consume the music. There was an architect here in NL that incorporated a clause in the contract for designing a large apartment building that nobody was allowed to hang their washing outside to dry. I personally don't think artists should have any say in the consumption of their art and its eventual use once they release it. You want to dictate how it is used? Keep it to yourself.
- adrian_mrd 5y ago
  Good points. Also worth noting that there are some LPs that are designed to be played in a random/shuffle order. The first one I heard about - although I've never heard the band confirm this - was the Red Hot Chili Pepper's Stadium Arcadium from 2006. A double CD LP designed to be played in any order was/is the rumour. Very likely some artists have released LPs in the 'streaming era' that are the opposite of Adele's wish; that is, they have no set track listing.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    It has been a tradition for a long time for LPs to be played in order. That's why B-sides exist. Some of the greatest bands of the past carefully constructed their LPs to tell a story. Pretty much every Pink Floyd album is meant to be listened to in order. The cuts are so seamless you might not even notice the track changing. I used to download singles and I never really understood non-pop music. Once I started listening to albums as a whole, I had a new appreciation for older bands. The art of making an LP is somewhat lost now with the rise of singles. But some artists, like Perturbator or pretty much anyone signed to BloodMusic, still produce LPs and even sell vinyl. I know it may sound exaggerated, but I promise anyone who has never listened to their favorite rock and roll artists albums from start to finish, do it. You will have a newfound respect for the narrative rather than just thinking the band made good singles. Some singles might appear kind of meh in isolation but in the context of an LP, fit right in. I honestly wish some of these streaming services had a way to turn on album radio rather than single radio. Single radio is such a destructive thing for so much of music crafted in the way I described above. Artists or users should be able to designate whether an album is a whole or a collection of singles. Then the steaming services should have some modes to interface with this flag. Otherwise, the music is just being consumed in a way it wasn't really intended. This is also why actual radio doesn't do some artists the justice they deserve. Pink Floyd singles are good but their LPs are 100x better, even the songs people consider to not be hits, they make more sense and don't stand out as bad. I could talk for days about how "this one trick" changed my entire perspective on music. Perhaps I'll just make a YouTube video about it and title it "Streaming services are destroying Music!"
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Reading between the lines, it sounds like this was a planned UI change anyway but their PR/social media people seized the opportunity to make it sound like it was some coordination with Adele: > The streaming service replied "anything for you" and took away the option for listeners to mix up the order music is played from album pages. > However, the shuffle symbol - two intersecting arrows - still appears on individual album tracks. > This means it is still possible to start listening to albums on any track and opt for songs to be played in a random order. If users can still listen to albums in shuffle order then this isn’t really as drastic as the headline sounds. I’m personally not a fan of being told how I have to listen to content, but if it’s just a UI change to how shuffle is enabled then it’s not a big deal.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yeah, honestly it was a pretty crappy UI idea back when the big green "Play" button would re-enable shuffle rather than just playing the album/playlist. I feel like it's just obviously user-hostile?
petepete 5y ago
This is definitely a step in the right direction. Spotify's UI was really lacking in this department too, having to disable shuffling for albums but enable it for some playlists was a chore.
strulovich 5y ago
When I started using Spotify (it back then Rdio for a while) it would end an album and start playing another, and it would surface top albums easily. This result in getting me to listening to full albums as my main style of listening to music, and growing up listening to a lot of radio I find it much better. Sadly, Rdio closed down and Spotify changed its UI to deemphasize listening to albums. I get why, but still, it’s a shame.
- dls2016 5y ago
  My number one beef with streaming services is the difficulty of listening to full albums. I try to spend a few bucks a month on Bandcamp.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Huh? I listen to full albums on Spotify all the time. You just go to the album, hit play or the first track and you’re done. If you don’t like that it keeps playing stuff after turn off “autoplay” in the settings.
newsbinator 5y ago
Next step: Adele gets Spotify to play only Top 40 hits over and over, except on College Spotify. Times have changed. If you want an album to be played in order, number your song titles or something. Why take control away from the user?
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Not being offensive... Because that's the difference between a "pop star" / "rock star" and an artist. The former is market driven. The latter driven by (creative) self. In this case the artist has an ideal about how her creativity must be communicated in order to understand the work. Madonna? For example, doesn't care as long as the money keeps rolling in :)
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Songs on albums are already numbered. By the order in which they’re arranged and meant to be heard.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    I agree the default should be to play an album in the order in which it was arranged. Unless I've got my shuffle setting on. I wouldn't mind having the option to "shuffle always" vs "shuffle playlists but not albums". But in any case I'm a person who likes to listen to music on shuffle, whether or not its within an album. I prefer Spotify not take that power away from me.
    - wlonkly 5y ago
      What you describe in the first sentence is what is now true, but was not before Adele's tweet.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  Spotify pays per song, versus overall time spent listening to an artist. It pisses me off that artists are forced to separate songs into separate tracks in order to maximize money. I get the incentives on the artist side, but fuck Spotify for forcing that
steve-benjamins 5y ago
Good or bad this shows how much influence major labels have over Spotify. Can you imagine YouTube bringing back dislikes for MKBHD?
- kzrdude 5y ago
  It's nice when it's the artist and not the label that's swinging their influence around.
  - steve-benjamins 5y ago
    For sure! Though I don’t think Adele would get this if she was an independent artist.
arthur6667 5y ago
Bit pedantic tbh, but I'm gald for it. I'm always confused and anoyed by the shuffle. it's magically turned on somehow and I'm always confused as to why and how. Now let me remove podcasts from my home screen. Also stop lying about what I've listened too. I have never and will never listen 'Happy Hits'. ktnxbye
oxymoran 5y ago
I love this. Not my type of music but this confirms to me this music is art, not the typical pop drivel to be consumed in tiny, disjointed packets of “shininess”. Respect.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Art that is easy to consume is still art. Making art that can be enjoyed by tired laypersons after work limits what you can do, which makes it much harder to make and work with than trying to make complex pieces to convey meaning. It might not be to your taste but it definitely isn't drivel.
causality0 5y ago
It's funny how the habits I built during the era of CDs and cable television serve me better now in 2021 than they did five years ago. All my music is stored locally on my phone and I listen to it however I want. The TV shows and movies I like are similarly archived on my desktop and I consume them in any manner I please. I have content that isn't available anywhere else on earth aside from other archivists, having long been removed from even the most obscure host or tracker.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  what player do you use?
  - Causality1 5y ago
    I like foobar2000 for its UI but it could be faster at rapidly skipping songs.
- nsajko 5y ago
  > I have content that isn't available anywhere else on earth aside from other archivists, having long been removed from even the most obscure host or tracker. You mean like bootleg releases? Which authors or musicians do you cover?
  - Causality1 5y ago
    As far as I'm aware none of my music is particularly rare. I'm mostly referring to video content creators have decided no longer suits their public persona and have deleted, or was taken down by legal threats or ToS violations. Also some web pages and web comics that have gone offline without making it onto the Internet Archive. Now that I think about it much of my porn archive would also be difficult to locate copies of, though that isn't nearly as organized. Basically if I like something I keep it forever.
twobitshifter 5y ago
To be an old man, how did we get to the point where your music and the software you use to play the music cannot be independent things? I have a Spotify subscription - if I want to shuffle albums or not or use a different shuffling algorithm, that should be possible. If I want to use my own visualization with the song or a different EQ mix, I should be able to do that too. Spotify isn’t only the music service, they’re a player, recommendation engine, eq, and visualization. This really limits the abilities of other software to compete in those spaces. Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools?
- Scarblac 5y ago
  On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Anyway, presumably you can still copy the album to a playlist and shuffle that.
  - logical_proof 5y ago
    That happened the moment that they recorded it and sold it you to listen to at your convenience. To think that an artist should have the ability to tell me how to enjoy their art is just ludicrous. There is nothing wrong with an artist saying that the best way to listen is x, y, or z. But, to tell me I have to listen in their order strikes me as invasive.
    - melenaboija 5y ago
      Maybe it is a discrepancy on who thinks that owns what. Artists own their creations and maybe have the right of not wanting to call it their album if it is not shon as they want. On the other side I guess they could just choose another platform and I am pretty sure that Spotify did because they think it is better for their business, whatever that means.
      - sp332 5y ago
        Artists have certain rights, like copyright. But they do not literally own their creations if they have sold them. See "first sale doctrine" for example.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
The constructs of album, single and playlist are begging to be expanded on in the space of Apple Music and Spotify. What I want are listening modes. When I listen to a concept album or other work that is intended to be contiguous, I want to consume it that way (and when it is over don't you dare start playing some promoted artist). When I'm exploring some new artist, I want it to shuffle through all of the most popular songs. I want each artist to have an auto playlist that is manually adjustable and expandable to closely related artists. I want genre meta categories so I can tame the genre chaos. I could go on, but the point is that this duopoly isn't driving progress properly because the choice of being on Apple Music vs. Spotify is more about a larger ecosystem choice than features and functionality.
marcodiego 5y ago
Complacency with service as a software substitute: that is how we arrived at this point. It is sad when we no longer can choose the software we run... right now we're arriving at a point where what is we run is no longer 'software' anymore. Control has been entirely taken out of the user's hands.
jspash 5y ago
Now how can I get Spotify to stop showing me joe rogan's ugly mug every time I open the app? I never gave Spotify a hint that I'm even remotely interested in his show except the first time it showed up I went looking for a "permanently block this" from my feed. Maybe they misread that as a positive signal?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  They know you better than you know yourself... that's why Youtube keeps recommending k-pop and sailing videos to me (I really have no clue why and have already asked the other occupants of the dwelling, nobody confessed...).
evanriley 5y ago
I think people are getting confused, and the title of the news reports aren't helping. Spotify didn't take away the ability to shuffle on album pages, they just changed the "default". In their mobile app the large green bottom under the album cover and to the right used to play the album but would turn on shuffle, and it now just plays the album. If you look at the now playing song, the shuffle button is still there. This button: https://0x0.st/-7Hd.jpeg https://0x0.st/-7Hd.jpeg
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Does Spotify still have 3-4 play buttons visible on the UI? Feels like the user interface isn't too well thought out. https://twitter.com/AS1F_IQ/status/1404744877892456448 https://twitter.com/AS1F_IQ/status/1404744877892456448
  - _fat_santa 5y ago
    I actually really like it when companies do this. Different people will access the same feature in different ways, from different places. Much like there are multiple ways to open a file in VSCode, it's not that the UI is poorly thought out, it's very well thought out and gives users multiple ways of doing a thing.
  - runj__ 5y ago
    Two of those are just indicators of what playlist and song is playing, sort of like pwd, sure you can press them to pause but that's hidden functionality. The top and bottom pause buttons are for people who don't know about keyboard shortcuts and don't want to move their mouse all the way up or down the app.
  - kgeist 5y ago
    Our product has a similar feature - several buttons in different places which do the same thing. Our UX designer explained that different users expect to find the button in different places, so they put it in all of them.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
null_object 5y ago
This is possibly a generational difference, but I HATE the shuffle play, and find it horribly grating when I start playing an album from the first track, and find that Spotify has decided to toggle shuffle on again, despite me always turning it off and being super-careful to not click the big 'play' button that's simply a UI trick to re-enable shuffling once again. Equally annoying is the fact that even though I've chosen to not play 'related music' after my album has finished playing, somehow Spotify manages to ignore that user-preference each time I update the app. Spotify is a perfect example of a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers.
- fho 5y ago
  I mean ... it is relatively clear why this is happening isn't it? Artists pay to promote their material, so Spotify needs an excuse to play "random/related" music to it's costumers.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  Is this behavior on a particular platform? I've never encountered this behavior and don't particularly pay attention to what I click. I sometimes tried using shuffle on some playlists, but that's extremely rare, and when I go to another playlist or album shuffle seems disabled. On the desktop I don't have the big "play shuffled" button at all. I only see it on the iphone for playlists. I've checked a few albums, and they had the regular play button.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
  She did good. Now have them fix the UI. It’s hard to find what you want sometimes.
- laumars 5y ago
  Depends on what I’m listening to. If it is a playlist then I love shuffle because it keeps the playlist fresh. However for albums I completely agree with you. You’d think it would be smart enough to detect when an album is on an default to not shuffling.
- hericium 5y ago
nxpnsv 5y ago
Play random disappeared, but if you have shuffle turned on and press play on an album it still plays random. For my usage nothing has changed and spotify hasn't prevented anyone of listening differently. If you have a preferred order, just add tracks to a playlist and drag tracks around like you please. When it comes to Adele, my preference is to listen to something else...
kristofferR 5y ago
BTW, people should check out Spicetify [1], it's a package manager for customizing the Spotify desktop UI and adding apps/extensions/themes. I've hidden podcasts, added panes for the latest releases of artists I follow and playlist from reddit. If you want you can also totally retheme it. [1] https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli
j7ake 5y ago
Does anyone still remember the days of making a “mix tape” or “mix CD” as a gift to someone? The power to mix tracks across albums and artists should be at the discretion of the listener. New ordering of pieces/songs can enable new interpretation of music.
zz865 5y ago
I'd love a great way to listen to a playlist albums. I think Ozzy said it best when he said when you bought a record usually there were often some songs you didn't like, but after listening to the album a few times they became some of your favorites.
colanderman 5y ago
They Might Be Giants took the opposite tack regarding shuffle and leaned into it on their album Apollo 18 (their best, IMO): > "Fingertips" is a series of 21 short tracks ranging in duration from four to 61 seconds, totaling 4:35. Referring to these tracks, the album's liner notes include the message "the indexing of this disc is designed to complement the Shuffle Mode of modern CD players". According to John Flansburgh, listening to the album on shuffle made a collage of songs, with the short fingertips interspersed among tracks of regular length. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(album)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deeblering4 5y ago
Shuffle on Spotify doesn't act right either. If I shuffle my liked songs it will play roughly the same few songs every time, like they shuffled it once and cached that playlist. It’s a terrible shuffle implementation.
alkonaut 5y ago
Good. Shuffling albums should perhaps be possible but it shouldn’t be a front an center feature. The software shouldn’t give the impression that shuffling or not is a 50/50 call, but rather a rarely used feature. It’s like how authors put their chapters in order in print. If you want to read the chapters out of order you can, but the book gives a very strong indication of what the author’s intended order is.
szastamasta 5y ago
There’s a piece of me that feels a bit wrong about this. When I’m listening to the album I want to experience it my way. Maybe I want to shuffle albums, maybe not. I don’t think that artist freedom to order tracks is worth more than my freedom to shuffle them.
ssharp 5y ago
Album shuffle seems like an extremely weird feature to me, almost on the same level of weirdness as linear playlists, except in "mixtape" use-cases.
NoblePublius 5y ago
The narcissism necessary to insist on this is perhaps only rivaled by the desperation of Spotify to secure her business.
Borrible 5y ago
Sounds fun, do they shuffle Beethoven's ninth? Okay, its just four movements, but they could split it by tempi. Don't know if Ludvig van would have been fond of it, but Alex would shive the cables to the mozgs of those bratchnys with his sharpy britchna. Just in case there are any classic fans in need of an alternative: https://app.idagio.com https://app.idagio.com ... One, two, three, four... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeeK37wrBDQ&list=OLAK5uy_neKJhoE9IdbhQoGuAI22y4ccDrbdqJc1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeeK37wrBDQ&list=OLAK5uy_neK...
quesera 5y ago
Somewhat related: I'd like a TUI music player that, when an artist is selected, will order their releases chronologically. So when I hit Play, it starts with the first release and ends with the newest release. Default is usually alphabetical by release-title, which is absurd. And of course Adele speaks truth: songs on each release should be played in album-order. While I'm feature requesting into the ether, I want a new control for "Stop/Pause after this track ends", so that I don't have to pause in the middle of a track, and resume in the same place. Instead the song would continue to play as I walked away (and audible, if playing over speakers), and when I returned and resumed, playback would begin in a more-reasonable location than "somewhere in the middle of the track". Am I alone in these preferences?
- egypturnash 5y ago
  So when I hit Play, it starts with the first release and ends with the newest release. Default is usually alphabetical by release-title, which is absurd. You're not alone in these preferences, This is how I always ordered my CDs back when that was how I listened to music. It wasn't uncommon to see album collections ordered this way, either. Fiction on my shelves mostly alphabetized by author, then chronological within an author's section, with exceptions often made to put a series together; I've seen that in a lot of personal libraries. Apple Music on the desktop does let you order stuff by artist and then by year, visit the View menu. It's a setting you have to make for every playlist/Library section. Dunno if the iOS version lets you do it. "Stop after this track" is a thing I didn't know I wanted until you said it and now I want it a lot.
beardyw 5y ago
Historically a sequence of musical pieces would be defined initially, but be subjected to rework and revision over time. The LP was a departure from that. Unfortunately the poor tracks stay forever. I would swap an 'always skip this' for shuffle any day.
w-m 5y ago
I'm not sure how common this was: the shuffle function in a CD player I used always used the same order for the same CD. Maybe they had a predefined shuffle-list of integers, that they used mod the number of tracks on the CD. Or seeded their pseudo RNG with something from the CD. Whatever the implementation, you only got two modes for playing one CD: in order, or "shuffle" - in a predefined, seemingly random, but still always consistent order.
- torified 5y ago
  All the ones I've used were properly random, same disc plays in a different order each time.
torified 5y ago
Arr me hearties, sail the ocean deep and shuffle with impunity!
beermonster 5y ago
I don’t really use Spotify although I’ve tried it once or twice. I seem to recall I was unable to play an album in any mode other than shuffle. It’s quite annoying as I listen to music from a time where artists spent a lot of time arranging the track order. I wondered if it would mean that albums would, over time, change to match the playback technology i.e. artists would change how they arrange their albums to align with how they’re listened to. I hope not as they then just become compilations rather than a story to be told.
- wlonkly 5y ago
  Free tier Spotify accounts can only use shuffle play.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    Ah that explain it. Thanks.

182 points by simonswords82 5y ago

I have her newest album loaded on the Spotify Windows desktop client right now and shuffle is enabled and working just fine for me. https://i.imgur.com/iiVbmks.png https://i.imgur.com/iiVbmks.png

kyriakos 5y ago

As someone who listens to electronic music for which a lot of albums are collaborations or by mixed tracks by many artists Spotify is completely useless to me. This is because I rarely find any album which has all the tracks available. Most have tracks locked due to licensing issues. It could be partly my location but nonetheless Spotify makes me want to pirate.

jacquesm 5y ago

On the one hand, I get it: Joe Jackson's 'Night and Day' is laid out as a work of art, and to play the album out of order would be very strange, they are even mixed to segue into each other except for the change from the day side to the night side. But as soon as you put only radio edits on your albums and cut them off anyway between tracks that argument gets a lot weaker, and 'power to the user' means that the user gets a say in how their content is consumed. Artists that only release albums are pretty rare. What the article isn't really clear about is whether this goes for all artists or just for Adele, it would be a lot nicer if both Spotify and Adele would respect the fact that streaming isn't vinyl (or CD, for that matter) and that end users, you know, that pesky customer, have other ideas on how to best consume the music. There was an architect here in NL that incorporated a clause in the contract for designing a large apartment building that nobody was allowed to hang their washing outside to dry. I personally don't think artists should have any say in the consumption of their art and its eventual use once they release it. You want to dictate how it is used? Keep it to yourself.

adrian_mrd 5y ago
Good points. Also worth noting that there are some LPs that are designed to be played in a random/shuffle order. The first one I heard about - although I've never heard the band confirm this - was the Red Hot Chili Pepper's Stadium Arcadium from 2006. A double CD LP designed to be played in any order was/is the rumour. Very likely some artists have released LPs in the 'streaming era' that are the opposite of Adele's wish; that is, they have no set track listing.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  It has been a tradition for a long time for LPs to be played in order. That's why B-sides exist. Some of the greatest bands of the past carefully constructed their LPs to tell a story. Pretty much every Pink Floyd album is meant to be listened to in order. The cuts are so seamless you might not even notice the track changing. I used to download singles and I never really understood non-pop music. Once I started listening to albums as a whole, I had a new appreciation for older bands. The art of making an LP is somewhat lost now with the rise of singles. But some artists, like Perturbator or pretty much anyone signed to BloodMusic, still produce LPs and even sell vinyl. I know it may sound exaggerated, but I promise anyone who has never listened to their favorite rock and roll artists albums from start to finish, do it. You will have a newfound respect for the narrative rather than just thinking the band made good singles. Some singles might appear kind of meh in isolation but in the context of an LP, fit right in. I honestly wish some of these streaming services had a way to turn on album radio rather than single radio. Single radio is such a destructive thing for so much of music crafted in the way I described above. Artists or users should be able to designate whether an album is a whole or a collection of singles. Then the steaming services should have some modes to interface with this flag. Otherwise, the music is just being consumed in a way it wasn't really intended. This is also why actual radio doesn't do some artists the justice they deserve. Pink Floyd singles are good but their LPs are 100x better, even the songs people consider to not be hits, they make more sense and don't stand out as bad. I could talk for days about how "this one trick" changed my entire perspective on music. Perhaps I'll just make a YouTube video about it and title it "Streaming services are destroying Music!"

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Reading between the lines, it sounds like this was a planned UI change anyway but their PR/social media people seized the opportunity to make it sound like it was some coordination with Adele: > The streaming service replied "anything for you" and took away the option for listeners to mix up the order music is played from album pages. > However, the shuffle symbol - two intersecting arrows - still appears on individual album tracks. > This means it is still possible to start listening to albums on any track and opt for songs to be played in a random order. If users can still listen to albums in shuffle order then this isn’t really as drastic as the headline sounds. I’m personally not a fan of being told how I have to listen to content, but if it’s just a UI change to how shuffle is enabled then it’s not a big deal.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Yeah, honestly it was a pretty crappy UI idea back when the big green "Play" button would re-enable shuffle rather than just playing the album/playlist. I feel like it's just obviously user-hostile?

petepete 5y ago

This is definitely a step in the right direction. Spotify's UI was really lacking in this department too, having to disable shuffling for albums but enable it for some playlists was a chore.

strulovich 5y ago

When I started using Spotify (it back then Rdio for a while) it would end an album and start playing another, and it would surface top albums easily. This result in getting me to listening to full albums as my main style of listening to music, and growing up listening to a lot of radio I find it much better. Sadly, Rdio closed down and Spotify changed its UI to deemphasize listening to albums. I get why, but still, it’s a shame.

dls2016 5y ago
My number one beef with streaming services is the difficulty of listening to full albums. I try to spend a few bucks a month on Bandcamp.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Spivak 5y ago
  Huh? I listen to full albums on Spotify all the time. You just go to the album, hit play or the first track and you’re done. If you don’t like that it keeps playing stuff after turn off “autoplay” in the settings.

newsbinator 5y ago

Next step: Adele gets Spotify to play only Top 40 hits over and over, except on College Spotify. Times have changed. If you want an album to be played in order, number your song titles or something. Why take control away from the user?

chiefalchemist 5y ago
Not being offensive... Because that's the difference between a "pop star" / "rock star" and an artist. The former is market driven. The latter driven by (creative) self. In this case the artist has an ideal about how her creativity must be communicated in order to understand the work. Madonna? For example, doesn't care as long as the money keeps rolling in :)
ethanbond 5y ago
Songs on albums are already numbered. By the order in which they’re arranged and meant to be heard.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  I agree the default should be to play an album in the order in which it was arranged. Unless I've got my shuffle setting on. I wouldn't mind having the option to "shuffle always" vs "shuffle playlists but not albums". But in any case I'm a person who likes to listen to music on shuffle, whether or not its within an album. I prefer Spotify not take that power away from me.
  - wlonkly 5y ago
    What you describe in the first sentence is what is now true, but was not before Adele's tweet.
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
Spotify pays per song, versus overall time spent listening to an artist. It pisses me off that artists are forced to separate songs into separate tracks in order to maximize money. I get the incentives on the artist side, but fuck Spotify for forcing that

steve-benjamins 5y ago

Good or bad this shows how much influence major labels have over Spotify. Can you imagine YouTube bringing back dislikes for MKBHD?

kzrdude 5y ago
It's nice when it's the artist and not the label that's swinging their influence around.
- steve-benjamins 5y ago
  For sure! Though I don’t think Adele would get this if she was an independent artist.

arthur6667 5y ago

Bit pedantic tbh, but I'm gald for it. I'm always confused and anoyed by the shuffle. it's magically turned on somehow and I'm always confused as to why and how. Now let me remove podcasts from my home screen. Also stop lying about what I've listened too. I have never and will never listen 'Happy Hits'. ktnxbye

oxymoran 5y ago

I love this. Not my type of music but this confirms to me this music is art, not the typical pop drivel to be consumed in tiny, disjointed packets of “shininess”. Respect.

Jensson 5y ago
Art that is easy to consume is still art. Making art that can be enjoyed by tired laypersons after work limits what you can do, which makes it much harder to make and work with than trying to make complex pieces to convey meaning. It might not be to your taste but it definitely isn't drivel.

causality0 5y ago

It's funny how the habits I built during the era of CDs and cable television serve me better now in 2021 than they did five years ago. All my music is stored locally on my phone and I listen to it however I want. The TV shows and movies I like are similarly archived on my desktop and I consume them in any manner I please. I have content that isn't available anywhere else on earth aside from other archivists, having long been removed from even the most obscure host or tracker.

kzrdude 5y ago
what player do you use?
- Causality1 5y ago
  I like foobar2000 for its UI but it could be faster at rapidly skipping songs.
nsajko 5y ago
> I have content that isn't available anywhere else on earth aside from other archivists, having long been removed from even the most obscure host or tracker. You mean like bootleg releases? Which authors or musicians do you cover?
- Causality1 5y ago
  As far as I'm aware none of my music is particularly rare. I'm mostly referring to video content creators have decided no longer suits their public persona and have deleted, or was taken down by legal threats or ToS violations. Also some web pages and web comics that have gone offline without making it onto the Internet Archive. Now that I think about it much of my porn archive would also be difficult to locate copies of, though that isn't nearly as organized. Basically if I like something I keep it forever.

twobitshifter 5y ago

To be an old man, how did we get to the point where your music and the software you use to play the music cannot be independent things? I have a Spotify subscription - if I want to shuffle albums or not or use a different shuffling algorithm, that should be possible. If I want to use my own visualization with the song or a different EQ mix, I should be able to do that too. Spotify isn’t only the music service, they’re a player, recommendation engine, eq, and visualization. This really limits the abilities of other software to compete in those spaces. Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools?

Scarblac 5y ago
On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Anyway, presumably you can still copy the album to a playlist and shuffle that.
- logical_proof 5y ago
  That happened the moment that they recorded it and sold it you to listen to at your convenience. To think that an artist should have the ability to tell me how to enjoy their art is just ludicrous. There is nothing wrong with an artist saying that the best way to listen is x, y, or z. But, to tell me I have to listen in their order strikes me as invasive.
  - melenaboija 5y ago
    Maybe it is a discrepancy on who thinks that owns what. Artists own their creations and maybe have the right of not wanting to call it their album if it is not shon as they want. On the other side I guess they could just choose another platform and I am pretty sure that Spotify did because they think it is better for their business, whatever that means.
    - sp332 5y ago
      Artists have certain rights, like copyright. But they do not literally own their creations if they have sold them. See "first sale doctrine" for example.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

The constructs of album, single and playlist are begging to be expanded on in the space of Apple Music and Spotify. What I want are listening modes. When I listen to a concept album or other work that is intended to be contiguous, I want to consume it that way (and when it is over don't you dare start playing some promoted artist). When I'm exploring some new artist, I want it to shuffle through all of the most popular songs. I want each artist to have an auto playlist that is manually adjustable and expandable to closely related artists. I want genre meta categories so I can tame the genre chaos. I could go on, but the point is that this duopoly isn't driving progress properly because the choice of being on Apple Music vs. Spotify is more about a larger ecosystem choice than features and functionality.

marcodiego 5y ago

Complacency with service as a software substitute: that is how we arrived at this point. It is sad when we no longer can choose the software we run... right now we're arriving at a point where what is we run is no longer 'software' anymore. Control has been entirely taken out of the user's hands.

jspash 5y ago

Now how can I get Spotify to stop showing me joe rogan's ugly mug every time I open the app? I never gave Spotify a hint that I'm even remotely interested in his show except the first time it showed up I went looking for a "permanently block this" from my feed. Maybe they misread that as a positive signal?

jacquesm 5y ago
They know you better than you know yourself... that's why Youtube keeps recommending k-pop and sailing videos to me (I really have no clue why and have already asked the other occupants of the dwelling, nobody confessed...).

evanriley 5y ago

I think people are getting confused, and the title of the news reports aren't helping. Spotify didn't take away the ability to shuffle on album pages, they just changed the "default". In their mobile app the large green bottom under the album cover and to the right used to play the album but would turn on shuffle, and it now just plays the album. If you look at the now playing song, the shuffle button is still there. This button: https://0x0.st/-7Hd.jpeg https://0x0.st/-7Hd.jpeg

Hamuko 5y ago
Does Spotify still have 3-4 play buttons visible on the UI? Feels like the user interface isn't too well thought out. https://twitter.com/AS1F_IQ/status/1404744877892456448 https://twitter.com/AS1F_IQ/status/1404744877892456448
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  I actually really like it when companies do this. Different people will access the same feature in different ways, from different places. Much like there are multiple ways to open a file in VSCode, it's not that the UI is poorly thought out, it's very well thought out and gives users multiple ways of doing a thing.
- runj__ 5y ago
  Two of those are just indicators of what playlist and song is playing, sort of like pwd, sure you can press them to pause but that's hidden functionality. The top and bottom pause buttons are for people who don't know about keyboard shortcuts and don't want to move their mouse all the way up or down the app.
- kgeist 5y ago
  Our product has a similar feature - several buttons in different places which do the same thing. Our UX designer explained that different users expect to find the button in different places, so they put it in all of them.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

null_object 5y ago

This is possibly a generational difference, but I HATE the shuffle play, and find it horribly grating when I start playing an album from the first track, and find that Spotify has decided to toggle shuffle on again, despite me always turning it off and being super-careful to not click the big 'play' button that's simply a UI trick to re-enable shuffling once again. Equally annoying is the fact that even though I've chosen to not play 'related music' after my album has finished playing, somehow Spotify manages to ignore that user-preference each time I update the app. Spotify is a perfect example of a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers.

fho 5y ago
I mean ... it is relatively clear why this is happening isn't it? Artists pay to promote their material, so Spotify needs an excuse to play "random/related" music to it's costumers.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
Is this behavior on a particular platform? I've never encountered this behavior and don't particularly pay attention to what I click. I sometimes tried using shuffle on some playlists, but that's extremely rare, and when I go to another playlist or album shuffle seems disabled. On the desktop I don't have the big "play shuffled" button at all. I only see it on the iphone for playlists. I've checked a few albums, and they had the regular play button.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
She did good. Now have them fix the UI. It’s hard to find what you want sometimes.
laumars 5y ago
Depends on what I’m listening to. If it is a playlist then I love shuffle because it keeps the playlist fresh. However for albums I completely agree with you. You’d think it would be smart enough to detect when an album is on an default to not shuffling.
hericium 5y ago

nxpnsv 5y ago

Play random disappeared, but if you have shuffle turned on and press play on an album it still plays random. For my usage nothing has changed and spotify hasn't prevented anyone of listening differently. If you have a preferred order, just add tracks to a playlist and drag tracks around like you please. When it comes to Adele, my preference is to listen to something else...

kristofferR 5y ago

BTW, people should check out Spicetify [1], it's a package manager for customizing the Spotify desktop UI and adding apps/extensions/themes. I've hidden podcasts, added panes for the latest releases of artists I follow and playlist from reddit. If you want you can also totally retheme it. [1] https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli

j7ake 5y ago

Does anyone still remember the days of making a “mix tape” or “mix CD” as a gift to someone? The power to mix tracks across albums and artists should be at the discretion of the listener. New ordering of pieces/songs can enable new interpretation of music.

zz865 5y ago

I'd love a great way to listen to a playlist albums. I think Ozzy said it best when he said when you bought a record usually there were often some songs you didn't like, but after listening to the album a few times they became some of your favorites.

colanderman 5y ago

They Might Be Giants took the opposite tack regarding shuffle and leaned into it on their album Apollo 18 (their best, IMO): > "Fingertips" is a series of 21 short tracks ranging in duration from four to 61 seconds, totaling 4:35. Referring to these tracks, the album's liner notes include the message "the indexing of this disc is designed to complement the Shuffle Mode of modern CD players". According to John Flansburgh, listening to the album on shuffle made a collage of songs, with the short fingertips interspersed among tracks of regular length. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(album)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deeblering4 5y ago

Shuffle on Spotify doesn't act right either. If I shuffle my liked songs it will play roughly the same few songs every time, like they shuffled it once and cached that playlist. It’s a terrible shuffle implementation.

alkonaut 5y ago

Good. Shuffling albums should perhaps be possible but it shouldn’t be a front an center feature. The software shouldn’t give the impression that shuffling or not is a 50/50 call, but rather a rarely used feature. It’s like how authors put their chapters in order in print. If you want to read the chapters out of order you can, but the book gives a very strong indication of what the author’s intended order is.

szastamasta 5y ago

There’s a piece of me that feels a bit wrong about this. When I’m listening to the album I want to experience it my way. Maybe I want to shuffle albums, maybe not. I don’t think that artist freedom to order tracks is worth more than my freedom to shuffle them.

ssharp 5y ago

Album shuffle seems like an extremely weird feature to me, almost on the same level of weirdness as linear playlists, except in "mixtape" use-cases.

NoblePublius 5y ago

The narcissism necessary to insist on this is perhaps only rivaled by the desperation of Spotify to secure her business.

Borrible 5y ago

Sounds fun, do they shuffle Beethoven's ninth? Okay, its just four movements, but they could split it by tempi. Don't know if Ludvig van would have been fond of it, but Alex would shive the cables to the mozgs of those bratchnys with his sharpy britchna. Just in case there are any classic fans in need of an alternative: https://app.idagio.com https://app.idagio.com ... One, two, three, four... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeeK37wrBDQ&list=OLAK5uy_neKJhoE9IdbhQoGuAI22y4ccDrbdqJc1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeeK37wrBDQ&list=OLAK5uy_neK...

quesera 5y ago

Somewhat related: I'd like a TUI music player that, when an artist is selected, will order their releases chronologically. So when I hit Play, it starts with the first release and ends with the newest release. Default is usually alphabetical by release-title, which is absurd. And of course Adele speaks truth: songs on each release should be played in album-order. While I'm feature requesting into the ether, I want a new control for "Stop/Pause after this track ends", so that I don't have to pause in the middle of a track, and resume in the same place. Instead the song would continue to play as I walked away (and audible, if playing over speakers), and when I returned and resumed, playback would begin in a more-reasonable location than "somewhere in the middle of the track". Am I alone in these preferences?

egypturnash 5y ago
So when I hit Play, it starts with the first release and ends with the newest release. Default is usually alphabetical by release-title, which is absurd. You're not alone in these preferences, This is how I always ordered my CDs back when that was how I listened to music. It wasn't uncommon to see album collections ordered this way, either. Fiction on my shelves mostly alphabetized by author, then chronological within an author's section, with exceptions often made to put a series together; I've seen that in a lot of personal libraries. Apple Music on the desktop does let you order stuff by artist and then by year, visit the View menu. It's a setting you have to make for every playlist/Library section. Dunno if the iOS version lets you do it. "Stop after this track" is a thing I didn't know I wanted until you said it and now I want it a lot.

beardyw 5y ago

Historically a sequence of musical pieces would be defined initially, but be subjected to rework and revision over time. The LP was a departure from that. Unfortunately the poor tracks stay forever. I would swap an 'always skip this' for shuffle any day.

w-m 5y ago

I'm not sure how common this was: the shuffle function in a CD player I used always used the same order for the same CD. Maybe they had a predefined shuffle-list of integers, that they used mod the number of tracks on the CD. Or seeded their pseudo RNG with something from the CD. Whatever the implementation, you only got two modes for playing one CD: in order, or "shuffle" - in a predefined, seemingly random, but still always consistent order.

torified 5y ago
All the ones I've used were properly random, same disc plays in a different order each time.

torified 5y ago

Arr me hearties, sail the ocean deep and shuffle with impunity!

beermonster 5y ago

I don’t really use Spotify although I’ve tried it once or twice. I seem to recall I was unable to play an album in any mode other than shuffle. It’s quite annoying as I listen to music from a time where artists spent a lot of time arranging the track order. I wondered if it would mean that albums would, over time, change to match the playback technology i.e. artists would change how they arrange their albums to align with how they’re listened to. I hope not as they then just become compilations rather than a story to be told.

wlonkly 5y ago
Free tier Spotify accounts can only use shuffle play.
- beermonster 5y ago
  Ah that explain it. Thanks.