Shuffle on Spotify has long driven me crazy. I’ve got 7,000 liked songs, and I swear it seems like Spotify wants me to hear only the same three percent of them. There were some artists who I’d forgotten were in my playlists because Spotify decided they’d never star in my queue when I turned on shuffle.
Or so it seemed. It turns out that, at least according to Spotify, shuffle has been truly random for years, and they’re attempting to solve the widely perceived repetition issue by making it less random.
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what’s changing
“For the last five years, Spotify’s Shuffle was exactly that—random,” wrote Spotify in a November 13, 2025 announcement that, well, raised eyebrows because it never felt like that was what was happening when shuffle was enabled. “We relied on a standard, publicly used randomization method (the Mersenne Twister) to generate playlist orders that were mathematically sound.
“But, as we learned from user feedback, statistical randomness doesn’t always translate into perceived randomness. Think of flipping a coin and getting five heads in a row. It’s a completely valid random outcome, but it doesn’t feel random. That disconnect between probability and perception was at the heart of the challenge we set out to solve.”
“The task wasn’t to make Shuffle less random, but to make it feel more fair and more fresh,” wrote Spotify. How the update aims to do that is by creating a new, selectable shuffle mode called Fewer Repeats.
In this mode, Spotify will use the same Mersenne Twister randomized method to generate several potential playlists, and then judge them by giving them a freshness score. “We check how recently you’ve listened to the songs—both within that playlist and across Spotify,” Spotify writes.
“Each random sequence loses ‘freshness points’ for recently played tracks appearing early in the order. The earlier in the order and the more (recently) they were played, the more points they lose.”
The playlist with the most freshness points is the one that’ll play on your shuffle. “In practice, that means if you’ve just played ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘Sweet Caroline,’ those songs get nudged further down the queue, leaving space for others to surface,” according to Spotify.
The existing, truly random shuffle will stick around as an option, too. Just enable Standard Shuffle for that.
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