8 ms·

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 fi

• 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
  > 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 iPhone music player (Music.app; formerly iTunes.app) does exactly the same shit. I find Tim Cook efficient at making once great built-in iOS and maCOS apps annoying or barely useful.
  • djrogers 5y ago
    Umm, no - shuffle isn’t even a ‘switch’ in Apple Music, it’s a separate, equally sized button next to ‘Play’, and when you use it, it has no effect on future choices.
    • hericium 5y ago
      Yes, it is annoying that this option turns itself on and I don't have it at hand. It requires me to click on a currently playing title which brings next tracks list that has additional shuffle and repeat icons.
  • atirip 5y ago
    I am Apple Music customer since beginning and not once has been shuffle turned on automatically.
    • hericium 5y ago
      Maybe it's only happening with local music, which I have ripped from CDs. But, since we're at it, I recently lost the ability to search for local music without my phone looking for it on the internet and offering to download what I already own. Also, with introduction of Apple Music, Apple disallowed sharing music over LAN. I always found it useful to be able to play music that sits on just one computer on the network, from any Apple device. What once just worked, now became a subscription fee for iirc $20/mo.
      • blowfish721 5y ago
        Are you talking about iTunes Match which is $25/year? I used to keep everything myself in iTunes (music and movies/series) but the hostility towards local files had me move elsewhere. The not being able to search for local files is beyond annoying when using an apple tv and having a large local library in iTunes, I know they have since split iTunes into different apps.
• tomcooks 5y ago
  Perfect example of using a(n expensive) service even when it's annoying. Just stop using it, they'll hear your voice better.
  • jessriedel 5y ago
    Honest question: is there a better service with a similarly broad catalog? When I first signed up for a streaming service several years ago I went with Deezer since it seemed competitive and I knew Spotify was the evil empire. But bugs and a smaller catalog forced me to jump ship. I really wish it were possible to pay for a separate player/discovery app, in addition to my Spotify subscription, that had access to the Spotify catalog.
    • xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
      > is there a better service with a similarly broad catalog? There is not. > I really wish it were possible to pay for a separate player/discovery app, in addition to my Spotify subscription, that had access to the Spotify catalog. This is possible. The Spotify SDK allows you to do practically anything, the only caveat is that Spotify is in control of playback state, you merely request the desired state. In practice this means you can do whatever you want -- no shuffle, better discovery, write your own radio or suggestion algorithms, etc.
      • jessriedel 5y ago
        By "app" I meant to suggest on mobile. My understanding is that Spotify no longer allows 3rd party apps on mobile. Is that not correct? (And to be clear, I'm looking to pay for an existing app, not write my own.)
        • frosted-flakes 5y ago
          The default Samsung music player has a Spotify tab. I've never used it though so cannot comment on how it works.
      • 5y ago
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  I love the shuffle button for many cases and use it most of my day, but I wish they’d tag albums not meant to be played in random order (eg. Pink Floyd) and enable you to switch based on that flag.
  • thih9 5y ago
    > albums not meant to be played in random order Which albums are meant to be played in random order?
    • Waterluvian 5y ago
      The shuffle button has existed for decades so I imagine I’m not an exception in wanting this concept.
    • bckr 5y ago
      Techno EPs don't really care whether you play banger #1 or #2 first, as an example.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      Greatest hits other type of compilation albums albums before the Beatles often were not composed with an idea that the order of play was important, even though they were of course in a particular order there are probably quite a few others, I would say maybe lots of albums supposedly are meant to be played in a certain order, but only in some of them does it make a great difference - for example if you randomize The Dark Side of the Moon as mentioned it would have some tracks that were no longer functioning in relation to the others.
      • egypturnash 5y ago
        Those tracks do, however, function perfectly if you stick them into a multi-disc changer with They Might Be Giants' album Apollo 18, which contains "Fingertips", a four and a half minute collection of 5-10 second songs. Going between a bunch of British guys moaning about how terrible it is to be rich while fucking with a whole bunch of the most expensive recording technology available at the time is much improved by John & John interjecting "I found a new friend... underneath my pillow!" or "What's that bluuuuuuuuuue thing doing here?". For best effects I recommend also loading Nine Inch Nails' "The Downward Spiral" into the third slot of your CD changer.
• tomc1985 5y ago
  Shuffle is great for playlists, but terrible for albums I just wish shuffle was truly random, but it seems to favor tracks with the (edit- got this mixed up) lowest payout. I had the same track repeated several times to me in a few hours, in a playlist of several hundred tracks
  • ibejoeb 5y ago
    > it seems to favor tracks with the highest payout Why would it do that? Wouldn't it optimize for the lowest per-stream rate?
    • tomc1985 5y ago
      You're right, I had my wires crossed.
  • bumbledraven 5y ago
    When you listen to 60 songs from a shuffled playlist of 300 songs, the likelihood of hearing the same song 3 or more times is approximately 29%. (Quick simulation: https://play.golang.org/p/2RNADWRQx4h https://play.golang.org/p/2RNADWRQx4h) This is related to the Birthday Paradox. EDIT: Disregard this. I was thinking of shuffling as repeatedly choosing songs uniformly at random with replacement from the playlist, but commenters reminded me that shuffling shouldn't work that way. I found an open issue about this: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Shuffle-should-not-repeat-individual-songs/td-p/4960511 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Shuffle-should-...: "In a playlist of mine that is more than 6 hours long, shuffle often plays songs twice or three times within 30 minutes."
    • tomc1985 5y ago
      Sure, hearing one track a few extra times I could accept. But it happens a lot. And it seems to favor certain artists. I am well acquainted with the properties of randomness and what I've seen suggests some kind of weighting system.
    • setpatchaddress 5y ago
• tzs 5y ago
  > 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 queue management is just terrible. I don't know exactly what it is doing because I have never sat down and thoroughly experimented with it, but this is approximately what I see at least on their iPad app. If I add individual songs to my queue, when the last one finishes playing it seems to automatically add the rest of the songs from the album that song came from. It doesn't necessarily start playing them, but if I don't go in and clear them before the next time I start queuing up individual songs they can get played. I just want a way to easily completely empty the queue and whatever that "sort of in the queue but not quit" thingy is, and to have it only play songs or whole albums that I explicitly add to the queue. I'd also like a mode where when something is playing from the queue and I click a song in a search result or a playlist it adds that song to the end of the queue rather than starting to play it immediately.
  • vmception 5y ago
    > Spotify queue management is just terrible. I don't know exactly what it is doing because I have never sat down and thoroughly experimented with it, but this is approximately what I see at least on their iPad app. It changes and is incomprehensible.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    Spotify has every incentive to play you music that costs it less. What you want really isn’t that important to their bottom line.
    • ASalazarMX 5y ago
      This is about Spotify, bur now it has dawned to me why the hell Apple Music started insisting on shuffling to old movie soundtracks (Grease is the biggest offender) and indie singers when my playlist has thousdands of other options. Last Friday I had to skip half of the songs before I gave up and stopped it because it kept pushing the same few albums.
• ibejoeb 5y ago
  > a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers. I suspect that end-user subscriptions contribute a relatively small amount to total revenue. Their most valuable customers would be ad reps. That said, I think Spotify does a pretty good job making the end-user experience very nice. It's fast, reliable, relatively bug-free, has great integrations (it's a better sonos controller than the real sonos controller,) and the best catalog going. Criticizing the finer points is a useful exercise, but, personally, I'm not seeing any dealbreakers.
  • yusefnapora 5y ago
    As a former Spotifier, I can say that your suspicion is incorrect. The free tier is just a really effective acquisition funnel for paid subscriptions; ad revenue is just gravy on top. Ads do pull in a decent amount of revenue, but it's tiny compared to subscriptions.
    • ibejoeb 5y ago
      Wow, surprising! Thanks for in the info.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      The best Spotify users are the ones that pay but don't use the service.
      • jraph 5y ago
        How would you optimize the UX for this? Asking for a friend.
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          By keeping the monthly credit card payment below the two digit threshold.
  • bryan_w 5y ago
    The problem is that their growth team are legitimately evil people who are constantly thinking about "how can we force our users to do things that they don't want to do?". They can have all the features they want but if the growth team keeps up with these tricks to extend "listen time" metrics, nobody will like the product
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Aeolun 5y ago
  > Spotify is a perfect example of a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers. Or maybe it does? At least the things you are complaining about (minus the auto reset) are exactly what I desire to happen. I barely ever listen to a specific album (in a specific order), but often listen to an artists entire catslog.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Same. On mobile, most of the time I want my playlists to be shuffled. And Spotify recognises that in the UI. I know how to have it play in order which also works.
• sgtnasty 5y ago
  It is most annoying to listen to progressive rock on Spotify, removing shuffle will be great for me.
• easton_s 5y ago
  The WORST is when you play on a a smart speaker. I asked to play "Despicable Me 2" sound track while my kids and I were cleaning the kitchen. Its starts off a song by a song by Ceelo Green that is on on the album, then another song from the album, then goes into the Fuck You song By Mr. Green. WTF spotify. The Smart Speaker experience is pure Shite. Play the ENTIRE album I requested. AND let me choose "Explicit" filtering based on what device I am on.
• arthur_sav 5y ago
  Since we're ranting about shuffle... I have a favorites playlist with over 3k songs and if i just press shuffle to start playing - it keeps playing the same freaking songs. It's a mix of most recently added + 20 of my most played song. I have to scroll all the way down, pick a random song, and then it will start picking more random songs from the playlist. So frustrating.
• darepublic 5y ago
  Yup absolutely hate when companies do that. God damn jira tickets, story points, medium blog articles, user tracking pixels and not a lick of good taste to be found
• pornel 5y ago
  It's entirely a matter of preference. I like Spotify's behavior, because I don't listen to albums, I fill my spacetime with music. I want to press Play once, and not have to micromanage the player. It's actually the reason why I use Spotify. Apple Music plays one song I select, and then falls silent.
• ksec 5y ago
  >Spotify is a perfect example of a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers. I think that is a larger problem across the industry. And here is an unpopular opinion especially on HN. Tech is dominating every field. Tech is dictating trends. And Tech company are making consumer products but doesn't understand consumers. It is exactly the same on Apple Music at launch when they decide to not include a Loop button because it was all about the "Next Song". I felt Spotify, or arguably Apple has made the business case for Streaming Music ( or not since they dont make much money ). But in terms of product or UX they are not any better. Having said that I still think Spotify is far better than Apple Music. And Shuffle works for long playlist and not on Album so I am perfectly fine with the decision.
• wdr1 5y ago
  > This is possibly a generational difference, but I HATE the shuffle play I'm in my late 40s and very rarely do NOT use shuffle play. > Spotify is a perfect example of a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers. Oh please. You have no evidence for that. You don't like one thing & then decided your preferences represent the mass user base. Get over yourself.
• ryandrake 5y ago
  Mike Oldfield[1] (and probably many others) solved this by releasing one of his albums as a single ~hour-long track. Try shuffling that! That seems to be a pretty decent compromise to me. If you, as an artist, don't want listeners to play your work in random order, release it as a single track. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album)