Spotify stops shuffling albums by default, thanks to Adele

Thanks to a request by Adele, Spotify will no longer shuffle albums by default. This change was made following the release of Adele’s newest album ’30’. Unfortunately, it’s a premium feature, as free users are still forced to listen in shuffle mode.

Before this, the big green play button with a tiny shuffle icon on an album page would play the album in shuffle mode, ignoring the track list order that the artist made. This wasn’t really a big deal, as you could still play the album in order by tapping on the first song, but having the play button default to shuffling probably stings for artists that spent weeks and months curating the perfect track order.

It’s not a perfect comparison, but this would be like if Netflix defaulted to playing you random episodes of a TV show.

The issue was even posted on the Spotify Community forum as an issue, with many people agreeing that it’s just an annoying thing to deal with.

Now, the little shuffle icon is gone and the button plays the album in sequential order, just as the artist intended. We have Adele to thank for this small, but meaningful change. She tweeted out: “This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry! We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening”

It’s no surprise that Spotify bowed down to Adele for this request, as her single ‘Easy on Me’ currently holds the Spotify record for most global plays in one day.

If you’re the chaotic type, don’t worry. You can still listen to your albums in shuffle by going to the ‘Now Playing’ view and toggling it manually.

I hope this change brings the art of good album sequencing to light for the younger generations. This will expose more people to seamless transitions like from the first two tracks of ‘The Black Parade’ by My Chemical Romance, and even poetic narrative structures like in ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ by Kendrick Lamar.

Spotify also recently released the lyric feature to all users globally, allowing anyone with a Spotify account to sing along to their favourite songs on any device.

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