How does Smart Shuffle actually work?

[Darth_GTB]

Plan

Free

Country

Brazil

Device

Motorola / Web

Operating System

Android 14 / Ubuntu 20.04 / Windows 10 / Windows 11

My Question or Issue

So, how does it actually work? Because like, in my experience, it inserts some recommended songs every now and then and absolutely zero songs inserted were relevant. It has a lower rate of getting something relevant than the ads, which is actually impressive. Some rare cases of ads from bands are actually from genres I listen to. The recommended songs are less than rare. They are never relevant. Songs are not even from genres I have listened to in Spotify. Like, not even once. None of them.

I ask this because the weekly and daily automatic playlists are actually mostly well made. This means you use a different algorithm for Smart Shuffle recommendations. Why use a different algorithm that chooses irrelevant songs when you clearly have some good stuff there making those automatic playlists?

So, what does Smart Shuffle takes into account when choosing a song to recommend?

Thanks

[Darth_GTB]

Can anybody explain? How does it choose what song to recommend? One of the variables I think it uses is location as most recommendations I've seen are from folk bands from my country (but not from my region of the country). It can't be just that, can it? Because if it is, it's most likely never going to recommend relevant songs for my playlists.

[Dessi]

Hi there @Darth_GTB,

Thanks for reaching out!

The personalized Smart Shuffle recommendations are tailored to your unique taste, taking into account a variety of factors, such as what you’re listening to and when, the listening habits of people who have similar tastes in music, and the expertise of our music specialists. 

The recommendations will be renewed every day so your listening sessions stay fresh. If you don’t like the songs or think they're irrelevant, you can just turn Smart Shuffle off and back on for a new set of recommendations. You can also hit the minus button (-) if you don't want a song to be recommended again.

Hope this clears things up.

[Darth_GTB]

Hello, Dessi. Thanks for the reply

Then we have a bug in the algorithm, because it doesn't recommend songs based on my taste. Every single one of them were from genres I do not listen to. I honestly do not care about other people with similar tastes as me, but I'm sure the recommendations were also not based in that either. I'm 100% certain no one that listens to Heavy Metal, Classical Music, Brazilian Rock, Grunge, Punk Rock, etc. would also listen to the songs that were being recommended (it's usually a Brazilian genre called "Sertanejo", which is a modern version of a folk genre from another region of Brazil that I had literally never listened to before in the platform. It's very popular in Brazil, but not within people who lives in the same region of Brazil as I live and certainly not within people with similar tastes as me).

Also, I can't turn it off and back on because I'm on free tier and in Brazil that means I'm stuck with this. I tried using the (-) button but it doesn't work. It not only continued recommending the same horrendous genres, the next day it even recommended a song that I had already hit (-). The icon was red, indicating I had already told it not to recommend it.

And unfortunately I can't even open a bug report because it will be ignored and merged into the announcement post. I know it because I had already tried to report this behaviour as a bug.

I would love to see this being put forward for the dev team to take a look into

[Eni]

Hey there @Darth_GTB, 

Thanks for getting back to us. 

As @Dessi mentioned previously, it's possible that Smart Shuffle provides recommendations based on what's popular in your country, so you might hear songs you would not usually listen to.

We understand where you're coming from and we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us. We'll make sure to pass it onto the right team, as we always strive to improve your experience.

As a workaround, you can block the artist whose music you don't like. You just need to head to their artist page > 3 dots > Don't play this. 

Hope this helps. If you need a hand with anything else, the Community is here for your. 

[Darth_GTB]

Thank you,**bleep** your replies, I see your forum provider has also fixed the bleep when mentioning people. Good to know!

Thanks for showing this. I really struggled to find way to completely block certain contents. Blocking per artist is going to take ages, but I hope the algorithm will eventually understand these unrelated genres shouldn't be added. Those automated playlists don't have the (-).

I'll test it out in the next few days

[Darth_GTB]

Oh no... The forum did not fix it actually... How are you able to mention people without the bleep??

[Darth_GTB · Accepted solution]

Eni, I've got the chance to try your work around. It's very clunky and takes a lot of time to do it, so it's not really a good enough work around. I'll still have to keep using the web version both at the car and at the gym. At work I already use the web version because it being on PC is more convenient for me.

I would love to hear they dropping this feature from the Brazilian free tier. The standard shuffle is pretty bad too, but at least it is an actual shuffle (even if it's not a fair shuffle, at least it's a shuffle, what smart shuffle isn't).

Thanks again you two for the insights

So, for whoever gets here through search, TL;DR:

From Eni's reply:

- It recommends songs that are popular in your country (in my experience this seems to be the only thing being checked actually)

From Dessi's reply:

- What are you listening to

- At what time you usually listen to what

- What people who listen to the same kind of music you listen listens to (other than the same stuff, I assume)

- The expertise of their music specialists (whatever that means)

The feature to minimise the pain (from Dessi):

- Hit (-) to tell the algorithm that song is unpleasant

Since that doesn't seem to work, the workaround (from Eni):

- Go to the artist's page and block the artist (which isn't ideal, but since the only playlist I have is the Liked Songs, that might work for me after a couple months blocking artists every day)