When you hear a song of a specific artist, it doesn’t mean that the next song is likely to be from another artist. Spotify listeners fall in the same illusion. Throwing it once, or a million times, is not going to change the probability of each face: always 50%. If a coin flips heads three times or more, we tend to think that the probabilities of tails rise. Humans are not pretty good at estimating probabilities. When this second lines appeared, they created confusion among Spotify user’s, who felt that finding songs of the same artist in a row wasn’t being random at all.
However, in a Fish-Yates shuffle they both are equally to appear, as the second line pattern is also a possibility. When thinking about a random algorithm, we would probably predict that the system is going to make more patterns like the first line rather than the second. So in 2014, Spotify changed the algorithm from a completely random model to a new algorithm that was intended to be more appealing to the human brain.īut, before explaining this new system, we need to understand two crucial concepts that Spotify explained in a 2014 article addressing this algorithm dilemma: the Fish–Yates shuffle and Gambler’s fallacy. However, this mechanism wasn’t convincing the users, who believed that the shuffle was actually not random at all, and the company received plenty of complaints. “Truly random does not feel random”Īccording to Mattias Petter Johansson, a former Software Spotify Engineer between 20, the algorithm used to work perfectly random years ago thanks to a Fisher-Yates algorithm which made the mix completely unexpected.
I’ve been using the app since 2016, and after your years of daily use, I –and most Spotify users– have noticed that some songs tend to appear more than others, and in certain occasions, the same artist comes in a row.īut, why does this happen? Shouldn’t it be completely random? Have you ever notice that Spotify’s shuffle mode is not that random?
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