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And Finally Artist News Business News Digital
Adele convinces Spotify to stop shuffling albums
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 22 November 2021
Spotify has finally given albums a proper play button for its Premium subscribers. At bloody last. No more shuffling by default. And all it took was Adele asking.
“This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry”, the musician tweeted yesterday. “We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our tracklisting for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening”.
For years, album pages on Spotify have featured a big play button that shuffled the tracks into a random order when pressed. To get the streaming service to just stream the album as the artist intended, you had to click on track one to play from beginning to end.
Now, you can start banging on about the death of the album all you want, but artists are still making them and people are still listening to them, whatever you say. And if someone ends up on a specific page dedicated to a specific album within a streaming app, you’ve got to reckon that they were hoping to listen to it as intended.
This always made Spotify’s shuffle play button pretty much redundant, but the streaming service insisted on keeping it there anyway.
Acknowledging that it’s been a dick about this for ages, Spotify said in a statement confirming the change: “As Adele mentioned, we are excited to share that we have begun rolling out a new Premium feature that has been long requested by both users and artists to make ‘play’ the default button on all albums”.
“For those users still wishing to shuffle an album”, it went on, “they can go to the Now Playing View and select the ‘shuffle’ toggle. As always, we will continue to iterate our products and features to create the best experiences for both artists and their fans”.
So, yeah, in the unlikely event that you want to listen to albums shuffled into a random order, then you still can. But you shouldn’t. Don’t make Spotify think that was ever a good idea.
