Music streaming service Spotify mentioned it’s introducing a brand new shuffle choice that repeats fewer urged songs.
The corporate initially launched Smart Shuffle for paid users in 2023, a characteristic that added new songs to a playlist’s queue based mostly on customers’ beforehand performed songs and their preferences. Customers beforehand couldn’t disable this characteristic.
With this new replace, the corporate is making shuffle with fewer repeats the default for paid customers. This implies customers will hear fewer songs from their latest listening historical past and extra new songs.
If they need the usual Good Shuffle, they will go to Settings > Playback and select the “Normal” choice below the Shuffle Mode part.
Spotify added that each free and premium customers can faucet any track to play subsequent whereas shuffling with out rearranging the queue.
Lauren Saunders, product director for personalization at Spotify, mentioned that shuffle follows randomness, which suggests there’s a larger chance of listening to the identical songs once more.
“That’s the factor about actual randomness: It may be clumpy. Identical to you may roll three sixes in a row, a purely random shuffle would possibly by no means appear to play the track you’re hoping for, or it’d stack the identical artist or album nearer collectively than your mind expects. The maths is correct, however the feeling is improper,” Saunders mentioned.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
“As a substitute of providing you with one random order and calling it a day, we now generate a whole lot of really random variations of your playlist. Then we rating each for freshness, how just lately you’ve performed sure songs, how a lot selection is packed into the opening stretch, and whether or not you’re getting repeats too quickly,” she mentioned concerning the new method to shuffle.
Together with this characteristic, Spotify can be releasing an AI-powered recap characteristic for audiobooks to let customers make amends for a narrative to the purpose the place they stopped listening. Customers will see a recap button on the high of the audiobook’s web page, which is able to play a abstract of the story thus far.
Spotify mentioned that the recaps will present up after customers have listened to no less than 15-20 minutes of a ebook and are usually up to date as they progress. It added that Spotify will not be utilizing audiobook content material to coach fashions, and recaps don’t replicate the unique narration.
The characteristic is at present obtainable on iOS in beta for a collection of English-language titles.
