Shuffle, Radio, Selecting Songs & Suggestions

[wolfwhocriedman]

Plan

Premium

My questions are regarding multiple issues, mainly the shuffling of my library. Currently I have ~860 songs in my library. I usually flop these into a public playlist so that I can share with friends so they can listen through my whole library. I don't usually create other playlists unless I am feeling like listening to a specific artist. My taste is unique, so I find it difficult to really weed through and figure out a proper method for making individual playlists. Either way, I feel that these things *should* work.

When shuffling through my songs (be it my "liked songs" or dedicated playlist) I am finding that the same 100ish songs get thrown into shuffle on any given day at any given time. I know this to be true because there is music in my library that I stumble on, that I haven't heard in many months and probably would not have heard had I not done the work to do some digging. I have tried downloading the songs so to avoid any  possible internet connection issue, and this seems to happen regardless of where I am (on wifi or on mobile network).

Spotify used to give the suggestion of playing the "liked songs" on shuffle and then copying all of these into a playlist for a new shuffle mix. Firstly, that never worked - they still seem to favor the same ~100 songs. Additionally this option doesn't seem to be available anymore either as "cmd+a" and "ctrl-a" only selects the 100 songs that the desktop app has in its view. Anymore, in order to copy my whole library into a playlist, I have to go through and select 100 songs at a time and pray I don't miss any. I have tried this both on Mac and Windows computers and it doesn't differ - it would seem that this is an app issue not a OS/updates issue.

Lastly, I can't create accurate radio stations. Regardless of whether it is one artist or a playlist, or one individual song, it still gives me a radio chalked full of songs that I already have in my library, and again, it tends to stick to the same artists/songs regardless of what radio I start. For example: I can start a radio station off of a Sesame Street Soundtrack (not my actual music taste - hah) and what happens is that I receive the same exact radio that I always do which is full of songs already in my library. Not much of a radio for Sesame Street if we're shuffling the type of music that I actually listen to..

I feel like Spotify used to be so good with music discovery and had a really good algorithm in the beginning but now I am finding it hard to escape my limited access to discovery, and even my own saved music seems to be held hostage in most instances.

[bengarland]

I suspect Spotify is paid to promote certain artists, so their algorithms constantly recycle the same stuff no matter how much you try to make it more diverse. Unfortunately, none of the other music services are much better. It's like they all just want to play that popular songs over and over again, even from bands that have several albums and dozens of great songs.