As a programmer, I don't consider endless streaming music to be a luxury. Good tune-age is, quite literally, a core requirement of my workspace. ...
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A brilliant write up and I totally get your frustration. Obscure algorithms often make us wonder about bias I guess - are they skipping those songs for a reason? Financial? Their own moral code... You can make a conspiracy out of everything.
It's not just random though. For instance, our application tries to present records in a sensible order for users. The problem is that the inputs to what makes an ideal order are simple to propose but have "unintended consequences".
So in our case, we provide a service where users can prove their credentials to perform certain hazardous and semi-hazardous actions and demonstrate that they have the right levels of insurance. There is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions to vet external parties before they have access to a worksite.
What order do we put the results in? We have a Google-like search, so I can search for "Bob Plumber Air Con" near some location and it will respond in order. Now with geography, it will use a basic drive time calculation to order the results, and then it will score based on where matches were found and if they were exact matches or "sounds like" ones.
We also want to rank based on factors like "is their insurance info up to date" and then you have salespeople wanting to rank people higher if they are new or up for renewal. Those kinds of moral decisions have to be removed because they just pollute the whole thing with no meaningful purpose for the user. Even without them you can end up in some strange result sets that the user thinks are totally broken, even though they are absolutely working fine.
I guess the moral of that is: if the user thinks it's broken, it's broken. If two or more users would have conflicting views you have to give them the ability to solve the problem in a way that works for them.
Exactly. I went through multiple mental cycles trying to determine if there was some kinda underlying motive to the rigged shuffling. In the end, it doesn't really matter whether there is or isn't something nefarious. The critical point is that obfuscated processes can foster conspiracy theories.
I've been through a similar scenario. I worked for years on applicant tracking systems. We had this fancy comparison engine that would try to do a "smart match" between a job description and the applicants' resumes. Then it would assign a score and sort the applicants from best-matched (theoretically) to least-matched.
For some of our big corporate clients, we had to disable this feature. The reason was that, to comply with federal hiring statutes and liability concerns, the companies had to keep records of tangible qualifications that had led them to choose one candidate over another (as a counterpoint to the idea that they may have hired the applicant because they were male, or white, or whatever).
But if they were sorting candidates by our magic (meaning: obtuse) algorithm, there was no way that they could satisfy the audit requirement. In fact, their lawyers informed them that merely having this feature enabled in our app represented a liability to their company. Because if it was enabled, and some hiring manager sorted by that "magic" number (whether it was by accident or on purpose), that could theoretically bias the hiring manager in favor of a criterion that they could not define.
Absolutely. That's definitely my biggest frustration with the Spotify anecdote. I couldn't care less that they wanted to create their own fancy "better" shuffling algorithm. But when they did that, they removed the basic algorithm - the one that did real shuffling.
There's an overall air of condescension there that I've actually seen in many other companies/apps. It's this mindset that says, "We've decided that this is the best approach for you. You're welcome."
To me, it's particularly galling on the shuffle algorithm. They changed it because so many people didn't understand/appreciate what was happening when it was just a simple shuffle. I get that. But I do understand/appreciate it. And I definitely want to have the option for a real shuffle.
Great explanation of your thoughts. It taught me a lot about an aspect of a service I hadn't thought too deeply about.
I certainly get your sentiments, but overall I think Spotify is probably doing the best thing for their business the way the algorithm works now. How they control randomness now seems to satisfy a vast majority of their user base. Those who dislike the current algorithm probably complain disproportionately loud (like this entire blog post) for the number of folks who truly dislike it.
I don't think it is the right product decision to create more options, most of the time. There certainly are use cases for options, but those come at a cost. Not only is there an on going development cost with the increased complexity, but there is also a usability cost. Spotify specifically has done a great job of trimming down their UI to be the bare essentials. I still remember when there was a built in addon marketplace in the app.
Adding these settings probably does not warrant a large enough ROI to persue. I mean look at yourself, you clearly care a lot about this feature, but is that going to lead you to a new streaming music application? Probably not.
Also, you made the comparison of wanting switching playlists to work like switching radio stations, but those are even less random even in the most free and indie stations. I use to be a music director for a large college radio station, and we scheduled our music, for when no one was DJing, with weighted randomness.
I'd be curious how other streaming music platforms handle shuffling.
As a side note, the political jab in your post is a bit unfounded and unappreciated. I think dev.to should be mostly free of political friction. Clearly that isn't a true rule, as everything is political now adays, but blatant things like your Republican comment I think should be discouraged.
Life is Strange 2 had the greatest response I've ever heard to a heartfelt gripe about how talking about politics messes so much stuff up. (The "stuff", in this case, being two boys' lives in a Seattle suburb with their father, whose own life was decidedly less messed-up in the moments before he was no longer alive, compared to how his life goes throughout the rest of the game, which is not at all.)
— Brody, Life is Strange 2
That out of the way, I would be remiss if I didn't also spurn this particular political reference of Republicans' handling of civil rights, when Democrats have historically been all too willing to uphold decorum before observing humanity
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I've quite appreciated iTunes (which is what I will call Apple's Music app [which is not to be confused with Apple Music {which, itself, is not to be confused with Apple Records}], now and forevermore) and its smart playlist feature, for the fact that I have one such playlist, containing all of the songs in another playlist1 that I haven't heard in at least 25 days. I also have another playlist of all of the songs in my library that I haven't heard in over six months. This one gets... slightly less play, mainly for the fact that I have a lot of musical soundtracks, video game soundtracks, and many other songs from earlier years that, for better or worse, fit under the umbrella category "dork music", and the shame of those songs weighs heavy on me.
BUT, ANYWAY, with my "not heard in nearly a month" smart playlist, I keep abreast with any algorithmic biases that may be present in Apple's shuffle algorithm, and tend to be pleasantly surprised at how well it manages to have me hear all 400+ songs in that playlist fairly regularly.
(which — you wanna talk about "so improbable as to be impossible" some time — has, for the past two years and counting, shuffled in such ways, that the song playing at any given moment has underscored what has been happening to me or around me in that moment. Yes, I'm saying that my life has had its own theme music. for the past two. years.)) ↩
I'm not an "Apple guy", but I totally appreciate the utility of a "smart playlist" feature. I don't have any problem with Apple, or Spotify, or anyone else choosing to manually tweak an otherwise-random process. I get it. And quite frankly, it makes sense.
My primary annoyance stems from two factors:
Labels matter. Spotify doesn't have anything called a "smart playlist". They have... "shuffle". As a poker player, I know what "shuffle" means. And what Spotify does when you click that button most certainly is not a shuffle. Don't tell me that this button will shuffle my playlist if it does no such thing.
Features matter. Having the ability to truly randomize a playlist (i.e., shuffle) is a nice feature. It's a feature that's desired by a great many Spotify users. I know this because I've seen the forum threads that stretch on for thousands of messages from other users who are exasperated by Spotify's failure in this matter. So I would argue that any service that purports to playback your own lists should always offer the option to do a true, simple shuffle. If they want to offer alternatives way to "shuffle" the playlists weighted on other factors, that's great. But don't use those alternatives to completely replace the basic shuffle feature.
I fully agree. The current behavior that they call shuffle should be called something truer to what it actually does, which sounds more like an auto-DJ.
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Great! Now you've ruined the shuffle feature for me, I'll never be able to use it again without thinking about this post 😛
Just think of it now as the "Ordered In A Spotify-Approved Way" button!
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