Spotify shuffle has been awful for a very long time. I've had the same experience more times than I can count (shuffling the Playlist gives you the same order for the first 10-20 songs). I've also noticed in my case that if I have a very long Playlist (like 300+ songs), I never hear anything but the same 70 or so. I have my theories but I can't prove anything

[–] fiddlesticks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

They use some special shuffle algorithm that (they claim) weighs the songs based on how recently they were played, but you can change it in settings somewhere for true random

[–] h0rnman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 hours ago

Yeah but even when you do that, the shuffle is still garbage. What i think is happening is that they're loading the first X entries in the Playlist and passing that to the (bad) shuffle algorithm instead of passing the whole Playlist first. Then when it gets towards the end of X, it does the same thing with the next chunk. I can't imagine that it saves that much money but it tracks with both what I see and the general trends of enshitification

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

Part of my theory is my very specific tastes have strong armed the algorithm. I have a playlist with every genre i listen to in it and I abuse the shuffle button until something comes on that fits my current vibe.