Always reminds me of the time Apple introduces "Smart Shuffle" in iTunes in 2005 which "which lets the user change the “randomness” of shuffled songs".

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/09/07Apple-Introduces-iT...

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mcmoor 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is always brought up whenever Spotify shuffle is mentioned, but current Spotify shuffle is much worse than this. For me it consistently only plays a handful of songs in my dozens of songs playlist and all others are always shoved way behind in the queue.

My prime conjecture now is that there's some kind of caching reason where it's more advantageous for their CDN if those handful of songs are the only ones that're played. Funnily this also happens in my offline playlist, but I guess this is just because the same algorithm is also used there.

	▲	bob1029 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> My prime conjecture now is that there's some kind of caching reason where it's more advantageous for their CDN if those handful of songs are the only ones that're played. It's far more sinister than this. It has to do with royalties. They've got some secret algorithm that will even cut your account off from specific content if it's expensive and you consume it too frequently. I find no issues listening to pop cult shit 24/7/365, but when I want to listen to some obscure opera more than 3 times it inevitably starts to fade out like a ghost.

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owisd 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Announcing it Steve Jobs quipped “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random.”