Is Spotify’s random play button really random?
You open your playlist, it can be in apple music or Spotify or any other music app you like to listen. You press the play button while adding the shuffle option as well. In a surprising way, shuffling is so good, always surprises you with the best song you like on the playlist. You know this feeling that something just happened, three times a day the same song? What is the universe trying to tell me?
Many people enjoy using the shuffle button in order to shift between different songs in a random way.
Why do you like the shuffle mode?
I decided to ask why is it, why do people like to use shuffle mode while listening to music? The answers I got were quite the same:
- “Makes it interesting since you don’t know what song is coming next”
- “Kind of feels like listing to the radio (without ads) but with songs I like”
- “That way the next song is a nice surprise instead of the same expected one”
- “I like the unpredictability”
- “What do you mean? I never thought about the option of listening to songs in an alphabetical order”
Unpredictability and surprise are the keywords.
But, that is exactly the reason that some people got upset, they feel cheated. Those who look deeper into the random shuffle feature, often feel they can see patterns in their playlists.
I searched over the internet and so many complains about ‘Playlist Shuffle Algorithm doesn’t truly shuffle’. Some came with a conspiracy that Spotify is partnering with record labels.
So what is really going on? Is the shuffle button really random or it’s a trick?
Mattias Petter Johansson, a Spotify developer, wrote in an internet post: “So we got tons of complaints from users about it not being random…
“The problem is that to humans, truly random does not feel random”.
Babar Zafar, a lead developer at Spotify, interviewed for Tech Tent on the BBC World Service:
“Our brain is an excellent pattern-matching device, It will find patterns where there aren’t any.”
Spotify developers explanation is based on Gambler’s Fallacy AKA the Monte Carlo Fallacy. It’s the belief that if a particular event occurs more frequently than normal during the past it is less likely to happen in the future. It’s a trick of the brain that leads us to think that if something hasn’t happened for a long time, it is more likely to happen this time. For example, when rolling a dice, you tend to think that the next time number 5 is coming simply because it didn’t appear until now. Or flipping a coin and thinking it should land on heads after several flips. The truth is, statistically there is an equal chance of it to happen such as not happing. It’s the same in songs, if a playlist repeat artists or songs, it feel wrong but it’s actually has the same chance to be played.
What our brains actually crave from “random” is that our playlist songs get spread nicely over the playlist, trick of the brain. What happened next is an interesting move, after a lot of mathematical magic, is what Spotify does now. Spotify designed a new algorithm that distributes artists and genres more evenly. For example If there are five songs in a playlist, the algorithm will aim to play them at roughly 20% intervals.
Now, Spotify admits that the algorithm isn’t random it’s actually calculated to feel more random, not less.
What do users expect from random?
Another interesting test is from Netflix. They are testing a ‘random episode’ feature for certain TV shows.
For those who’ve been included in the test, the option appears in two ways:
- “Play a Popular Episode”, fans of shows as ‘Friends’ can probably enjoy any random episode, regardless of the season and shuffle definitely makes sense for shows that each episode has its own theme.
- “Random episode” button, once you’ve started watching a series that the service thinks this concept is a good fit for. Obviously, doesn’t make sense or is enjoyable for every show. But if you just want to throw on the big bang theory or Grey’s Anatomy in the background, or be surprised by episodes such as Black Mirror, this might actually prove rather convenient.
Shuffling conclusion
Shuffling started to make a lot of sense for certain types of content that has its own theme, such as songs on a playlist or episodes that aren’t linked. In products, like in life, people love surprises.
We expect our love ones to surprise us with presents on special occasions or when we ask from someone who knows us to order for us at the restaurant, so we can enjoy a surprise.
We do expect the same from products we love.
As designers we need to think of where in our application it will make sense to insert small delightful surprises in places that feel natural. It can be our playlist, our series, we want it to be random and full of surprises, just like we love.
