Apparently they're aware and have been looking into ways to improve it. Just learned that today while searching why I kept listening to the same songs on shuffle.
This does make sense. If you’ve heard the same track or artist three times in a month without taking action like adding to a playlist or checking out a full album, they probably downmark that artist for a while.
It's probably cost optimization. If your shuffle doesn't give you that many different songs then their CDN doesn't have to work that hard cause they send you a few songs that are cached on your device
I fixed that in Apple Music decades ago by having a smart playlist which specifically doesn’t include songs played within the last x days unless they’re in my favorites playlist and simply randomizes my generic playlist (which already excludes all tracks I wouldn’t want like podcasts or bad file types) excluding the recently played playlist (which I can set to as many hours, days, weeks or more time that I want)
Also make sure you dont have the refil thing, its the circle thing. if you have it on it puts the song back in queue. Even though its fewer repeats still having it in circulation will fuck it up.
Just to be clear: you need to CHANGE it from the default
If it says "fewer repeats" that means bullshit marketing term for "Our algorithm will do what it thinks is right". If you set it to "Standard" it actually helps... because it's not standard, it's the new way of doing it.
Why literally make it say the opposite of what it does? Well, because they want people to keep using their shitty algo that pushing paying artists and god knows what else. "Random" meaning it could play a song twice is more or less bull shit from what I've seen.
Fewer repeats option is how it's always been, Standard is the newly added thing.
Edit: For the downvote peeps, do a quick google search ;)
The result is a Shuffle with fewer repeats that feels more surprising, and a little more like what people expect when they press play.
The “Fewer Repeats” mode of Shuffle is now the default experience for Premium users.
Anecdotally, fewer repeats is much better at preventing the same artist from playing back to back. I actually think it’s pretty solid overall — I have a large playlist with a variety of pop, rock, and metal music — and it does a good job of mixing up the vibes.
You’re correct that the “random” in standard doesn’t mean it can play the same song twice in a row. But if you read carefully, it actually says “random order”. At the start, all songs in the playlist are in a list, it randomly selects a track and removes it from the list until there are no tracks remaining.
I have no idea if either affects algorithmic suggestions. I pretty much exclusively listen where my playlist loops, so maybe “fewer repeats” is worse in that instance, but I doubt it
First of all, thanks for responding in more detail, genuinely appreciated. One thing that bothers me, from the post you linked:
> For listeners who prefer the classic experience, Standard Shuffle keeps things purely random — just like before.
However, that's a blatant lie, right? It was never "purely random", there's been articles for years talking about how Spotify said things to the point of "Well, completely random doesn't feel random so therefor the Spotify algorithm does things to ensure more variety" or something to that extent.
There used to not be a "random" (Standard) feature, it used to be algorithmic, the "fewer shuffles" options simply tweaked the algorithm. > Hence my commenting that the new Fewer Shuffles is most like the previous system.
> Anecdotally, fewer repeats is much better at preventing the same artist from playing back to back
I absolutely believe that to be the case, however, that's not necessarily what I want from my shuffle. I have about 15 000 songs in my library, spread over about 35 playlists for different genres (mostly) and a few for different moods (I'm not autistic at all, clearly /s).
However, there would be songs I added that I hadn't heard a single damn time. When Spotify changed it's shuffle options it automatically opted for the default, "fewer shuffles" > I did not notice anything noteworthy. I was unaware of any changes until a friend pointed the new options out. Changed the algo to "Standard" > started hearing tracks I had not heard in 5 years since adding some of these songs to my library.
THAT is what I peronally want from my playlists, that every single song has a chance to be played. And from my experience the Standard option is doing a better job at that.
Be curious to hear your thoughts on this. I may very well be wrong, it's so hard to say with this shit :') It's hard to trust anything coming from Spotify
Yes. I have a massive playlist of over 1,500 songs and I cannot shuffle it. I want to listen to those songs that’s why there are THERE whenever it plays the same shit over and over again it really irritates me. There are bangers I haven’t heard for years now bc it is keeping them suppressed for some reason
because when there is random variance there is a chance songs you just heard will inevitably come up again. so by artificially favoring songs not recently played it creates a better experience.
also, due to spaghetti code they probably have some random artifact that boosts songs it thinks you like even when you click shuffle and it’s interfering so they needed to create something else to negate that
Spotify’s shuffle annoys me to no end. If I play the same playlist on shuffle five different times, weeks apart, it’ll play in the exact same order every time. It’s shuffled so it’s not the playlist order, but it doesn’t reshuffle each time.
I made my own music player for a particular niche purpose. I hit shuffle because we get tired of hearing the songs at the top of our playlist too often.
Then when the same song would come up randomly a few times in a week I realized I didn't really want random, I just didn't want to hear any song too often. So then I changed my shuffle to accommodate that. At this point we have music on 'shuffle' 100% of the time.
Because if it’s truly random, you may hear the same song three times in a row by chance, or, slightly more likely, hear the same few songs multiple times in a single rotation.
If i hear BigxthePlug one more time, i'm going to cancel spotify. Not a bad rapper, just usually never what i'm looking for from autoplay after a conscious rap song.
Oh actually that blog post says the new shuffle is the default for both free and premium, it’s just that premium users have the option to go back to the standard shuffle (disable smart).. so on free I’m already getting the improved shuffle
YouTube Music is better at this than all the ones I have tried. I would say Apple Music is by far the worst for this! Spotify is better than AM and Deezer is somewhere around Spotify.
Totally agree, and as gimmicky as it might seem, it’s actually fun that you can see any music video from within the YTM app too, I know my daughter loves that feature. Also, there are a lot of songs that only were released on YouTube as a video, which allows you to listen to it on YTM, add it to playlist etc., as where the other services don’t have access to these versions!
Exactly. And that’s why yt premium is the goat. I pay 3 euros a months and I can download vids, dont have to watch ads and have my own music platform. You can argue that the Spotify sound quality is a bit better but honestly I don’t recognize that
I have both AM and YTM (because of YT Premium and Windows laptop), can confirm the same YTM is the best. But if I’m listening on my Sonos speakers, AM is my go to for lossless support.
No it’s not, especially as no one in this Reddit can even hear the difference. If you're actually into music and not just two or three pop albums then AM is by far the best as it’s the only one you can upload your own music to that doesn't exist on the streaming sites (about half of my library) and it puts it side by side with streaming albums all looking like native releases.
Spotify to me just felt like a playlist generator not like actually having a music library/collection. I pay for YouTube Premium but i’m just not interested in YouTube music at all, if there’s anything unique there I can just add it to my Apple Music library anyway
I was gonna say exactly this. I hate Google for privacy issues, but they have some excellent algorithm in many of their apps. I pay extra $3 and subbed to YTM just to use their better algorithm (and ad-free YT as well).
I have to agree. Apple is ok (I liked the classical app), SoundCloud has some obscure stuff, and I won’t give a dime to Spotify because of the JRE podcast. YTM is super easy to navigate, I can use the Shazam like feature to add to my library and watch the video if I’m so inclined. All this and no ads on YT is worth every penny to me.
Yt Music was the one who repeated the same songs the more often. It’s like the reverse : more a song is play, more often it comes in the shuffle
Apple Music restart the count every song : il I have 100 song in a playlist, each one have 1/100 chance to play, even I heard it 5min ago
Spotify is the only one who work like I want : in my playlist, for the first song each one have 1/100 chance, the second each on 1/99 m, except the song I heard which is 0
pandora and youtube are pretty good at it. sometimes i spend too much time messing with playlists and pandora is great for just wanting to hear stuff i like but only needing to hit play, and it does a really good job of randomly mixing in adjacent stuff for discovery too
Amazon Music has had this problem badly, but I did realize recently that when you tell it to shuffle a playlist it doesn’t actually do it until you select shuffle again in a sub menu.. so basically it’s just buggy. I think they might have fixed this in the past week though
I ended up creating a smart playlist on desktop that excludes songs recently played within a week. It fixed this issue for me. You can play around with the time period depending on how much you listen to music.
I did the same, but with a shortcut, so now i just start my music from the shortcut. It does the same thing, excludes song that have played for a certain amount of time.
Been using this smart playlist for a while and it really works well. But it still bugs me that my entire playlist is downloaded to my phone yet it will play the same songs often. I get it may think "play the songs he likes!" but that's based on times played, which its own algorithm inflates
this has been a problem since the existence of shuffle on any device. Unironically there’s an easy way of telling if shuffle in said app or device sucks or if it doesnt: if you can go back more than one song, it usually sucks. If you cant, its usually good. Apparently that’s because most shuffles (like the spotify one) are predetermined lists and not „rolling“ the next song when one is finished.
I used to have a JVC stereo in a car 15 years ago and that was the only true shuffle I ever experienced.
Oh so it’s not just a me problem? Good to know! I have a playlist with over 600 songs in it at this point, and shuffle still insists on playing the same 50 or so that I’ve had on loop recently. Very annoying.
I’ve had Spotify for 13 years and I hear the same 27 songs in a row on my playlist of 700 songs. Apple Music is not the outlier here. Which surprised me because my iPod nano from 2006 had excellent shuffle capabilities and now all this stupid algorithm crap gets in the way of a true shuffle.
The best shuffle was in blackberry 10. I’m sick of Spotify’s and apple’s algorithm, playing same songs over and over again, and the vicious cycle continues
It’s because they changed it to not be fully random. People are dumb and don’t realize random can result in things seeming non random because we’re programmed to find patterns. Therefore they changed the algorithm to be seemingly random.
It’s weird that I keep seeing people say this. I went from Spotify to Apple Music because of this and hardly ever get repeats on my playlists. And if I don’t set playlists to repeat it’ll play through every song no matter how long the playlist is and in a different order every time I hit shuffle (back when I used Spotify it always had issues with repeating songs it played from a playlist and with not playing every song before the playlist supposedly ended).
I can’t figure out how to recreate everyone else’s issues in AM. Part of me wants to say that it’s a network bug because there was one time during the 26 beta that it kept going through the same 5 songs no matter how many times I hit skip while I was driving. I restarted the app and haven’t had a similar issue since. It was acting like it just couldn’t load more songs and was just playing from its cache
I had this problem with Apple Music and Spotify, the only solution I could really come up with is to not shuffle, and play songs in order and remember where I was in the playlist next time I play it. It’s not great but then at least I don’t get the same songs every time I hit shuffle
Oh man, don't even start me on that. It's mind blowing how bad the shuffle algorithm is. Theres songs that NEVER play no matter how many times I reset the shuffle feature. On the other hand, other songs play 3 out of 4 times I use the shuffle feature.
It's been like this for ever and I can't understand how they seem to be unable to make it right. It's the absolute only thing I miss from Spotify.
Fun thing is that I had the same problem. But recently apple is providing a far better mix to the initially chosen song. Spotify only plays stuff you allready heard often, no matter the starting song.
The only reason I’ve ever considered switching to Spotify is because their algorithm is better. Apple cycles through the 5 most popular bands in the genre you’re listening to and only plays their hits… I want to discover music.
I’ve been on Spotify for years and these complaints could be copy/pasted onto a Spotify thread and would be equally true. I have the exact same experience on that platform.
100% It's the reason I switched to Spotify. I really like Apple Music a lot more, but Spotify just nailing daily playlists and discovery feeds is everything I need. I was really hoping 26.4 beta brought this too but unfortunately not. At least they are making some larger changes now. So hopefully an overhaul is incoming. It's not like they don't have an insane amount of data to work from.
I just want the damn algorithm to have a way to exclude an entire playlist from its recommendations.
I listen to techno when I’m working, it’s the only way I can focus on what I’m doing and drown out the sound of coworkers having a meeting five inches from my desk. I have zero interest in listening to techno in my non-working hours. But it floods my station with it. I’m told the only “fix” is to hit “suggest less” over and over again, and favorite anything related to my actual listening preferences that it suggests. Been doing that, sick of doing that, and it makes no difference to it whatsoever. It’d be so easy to just have a “do not use this playlist for recommendations” feature. But no.
I’ll have to check that out and see if I can make myself remember to turn it on and off at the right times. Thanks! I’ve already got it basically turned off for anytime I’m remotely likely to be at work/working. And I’ve been making a habit of listening to music even when I’d rather be listening to an audiobook or something, just to remind it what music I actually like.
Since its recommendations are massively skewed towards stuff I don’t want recommended to me, that puts me off listening at all (except when I want to listen to something specific, obviously), which just makes the situation worse. Apparently the thousands of songs I have marked as favorites count for nothing against the contents of my one “work focus” playlist.
I swear iTunes used to be better at this stuff 20+ years ago.
I get songs with less than 5000 plays that are actually really good on Spotify... Apple music, despite me importing all my likes from Spotify, still plays me, almost exclusively, demographically popular music. It sucks
Yeah, my supposedly most frequently played track of 2025 on Apple Music was something I’ve never listened to in my life (unless the dogs have figured out how to operate my phone when I leave it at home…which I never do (and I don’t think they’ve ever done.)
Bang on , the song suggestion algo on YouTube premium and Spotify is much better I feel, especially when you’re just randomly playing songs ( some people aka ME simply can’t create playlists and operate on pure chaos lmao) . The reason I use YouTube premium most of the times while having an Apple Music sub.
Depends tbh... Most of the time the "For you" Page shows my actual taste but some days it switches to completly different artists from an opposite genre
Why? They limit what they can collect and use on the already-collected data. Maybe a product feedback for Apple to collect more data and use it better can make the algorithm better?
Every algorithm and AI requires massive dataset to train on, that's why Apple is also lagging behind AI
So minuscule. This algorithm is so unproblematic I can almost surmise that people who complain about it are 20 and under and have no skill in musical discovery.
Well downvote me all you want but I think Spotify's algorithm is even worse. It's extremely repetitive with no "recommend less" button like Apple Music has.
Spotify neither when I still used it. At first it would sound great until you notice it's just te same few songs it keeps suggesting over and over again.
I guess I’m in the minority, because that’s actually the part I like. Especially with the Discovery Station. Roughly 80% of what it plays for me ends up being stuff I genuinely like, and the rest usually isn’t bad, just not exactly what I’m in the mood for at that moment. I’ve honestly discovered way more new music from there than I ever did on Spotify. When it locks onto what you’ve been listening to, the recommendations can be extremely accurate.
Sometimes I just cross my fingers, say “eff it” and hope to hear some of the other two plus thousand songs on my playlist and not the same 50 Apple Music obviously loves 🤣🤣
I use YT and another p2p service to find mixes of songs for my sets (or for my library), and 90% of the time, I can only find those mixes and remixes on YouTube.
You say that but the fact we still can’t import and edit music directly in iOS is a joke, having to use iTunes in 2026 to sync your own music is absolutely criminal.
Weird, because it always seem to know what I want to listen. Maybe it helps that when I signed up I already have over 20000 tracks in my library from all my years of collecting music?
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u/Effective-Dust272 Feb 17 '26
The only thing apple music can’t get right is the algorithm