Spotify shuffle isn't random

Clip taken from Series R 'Random' which is available to stream now on iPlayer, along with every other QI episode! #shorts #QI

[samsonsoturian]

We don't want random songs, we want the playlist in a random order

[Hobbyrepubliken]

I don't want songs from my playlists played at random. I want every song played once, but in a random order

[corryunedited]

What we want, I think, is even distribution. Maybe shuffle the playlist so it plays in full with no repeats, then reshuffles and plays again.

[romulusnr]

Spotify dev team once had a long post about this, and how many iterations they went through to make the algorithm *seem* more random than... actual randomness. People were constantly complaining that shuffle "wasn't random enough" and the devs kept checking and improving their random function to make sure it was random. Eventually they realized that when people say "not random enough" what they're looking for isn't actually randomness. So Spotify added rules to the algorithm like "weigh songs by same artist lower after one plays" or "don't play consecutive songs in order" which is not really random.

[phoebejones]

I'm a mathematician with coding experience, and I think about this all the time. A truly random shuffling would allow the application to choose any song from the playlist, I stead of just reordering the songs in the playlist (the former shuffling allows songs to play more than once before every song in the list has played, whereas the latter doesn't). I am particularly interested in the following points:
1. An uncanny number of times, the song I'm thinking about plays next, as if the algorithm knows that it should play a certain song immediately after a specific song.
2. It seems that the shuffling order isn't at all random either, and seems to prioritize songs added to playlists more recently.

[gormster]

This was the iTunes “party shuffle” algorithm, specifically. It would weight the selection against things like the currently playing artist and album.

[davidranson]

I actually did this one time when I created my own MP3 player program. It selected a random song, but then checked if it has previously been played during that session. If it had, then it would choose a different one. That made it better to listen to because I wasn't feeling like I was listening to the same songs all the time

[someguydan]

Originally it was iPod and Apples shuffle function I believe that was accused of not being random. That was in 2005 3 years before spotify was started.

[paddotk]

That's not the issue with Spotify. I have a few thousand songs in my 'liked' list and it happens regularly that I hear the same 10-20 in the same sequence over and over until I skip a lot. That's not actually random (nor shuffle for that matter) at all. It's a bug they never tackled.

[jaredadkinson]

It wasn’t just the same song playing back to back — that could happen if you have the same song in a playlist twice (ie from when it was launched as a single and then again from the album version and maybe even again from the deluxe album and so on) — but also songs from the same artist or genre playing back to back, which even if it is technically random, doesn’t feel like it is. Of course if you make a playlist of 20 songs and 5 of them are by the same artist, odds are there will be at least one instance of two of those songs playing in a row but they had to modify the algorithm to edit that out as well

[flippy]

the issue with spotify "random" was it it would very rarely play song that were at the bottom of the playlist. Like I have 29 hours of music in my biggest playlist and the random keeps playing the newest songs added and very rarely some older ones

[HPeter]

When we say random we mean from unplayed songs in one sitting. If you play 3 songs out of 20 you can’t play them again until a) 1-20 is used up OR b) 15 minutes or more has passed since you last played a song.

[qarahiyo]

Most of my playlists usually have collection of favourite songs from one specific artist and even then one song is repeated more times than others while some songs are not played at all.

[julianaylor]

Best way to get a random play of songs, do it yourselves, from your own collection of physical media or pick as you go, from a streaming service.

[geoffroi-le-Hook]

I had a Sony CD player in the 1990s with a Shuffle function. It would not play the same track back to back (as I discovered when shuffling a disc with only 2 tracks).

[merkyuk]

It’s easy in code to have lets say 100 items and have an item picked at random, removed from the list of 100 items so the next random item isn’t a duplicate. Then it’s 99, 98 items and so on that are randomized for a random order

[luuketaylor]

A mate of mine used to keep complaining about a game we'd play because some maps kept showing up with high frequency or back to back. I'd always tell him about this, but he never believed me!

[ambergris]

still doesn't work for mine. I have one main playlist I listen to all the time, and the same songs keep coming up, while sometimes if I go look I realise I haven't heard other songs for months. Oh, and my playlist is about 1200 songs long, so Spotify has choice as to what it wants to shuffle.

[craigdoran]

spotify does that where you can set it on shuffle but it won't replay a song until it has played all the songs on a playlist

[ianwilson]

I have on my phone 5 different artists singing the same song.On a 3 hour trip heard all of them plus one of them 3 times. I have more than 8000 tracks on my phone.