Spotify: Buttons for “Play” and “Shuffle” are separated
Spotify separates the “Play” and “Shuffle” buttons. However, only paying customers benefit from this.
Spotify improves the comfort when playing music and radio plays: In the future, buttons for “Play” and “Shuffle” will be displayed separately for albums and playlists. The change is expected to roll out to mobile apps worldwide in the coming weeks, Spotify said.
Spotify currently displays either a “Play” or a “Shuffle” button. If users want to activate shuffle playback, although they only see the play button, they must first start playback and then press the “Shuffle” icon.
It’s even more complicated the other way around: If you press the “Shuffle” button, Spotify jumps directly to a random song within the playlist. Then it’s practically too late to switch off the random playback mode manually, because it is very likely that several songs have already been skipped. Instead, you have to manually tap the first track and then switch off random playback.
Anger about “Shuffle” playback
Spotify currently shows a “shuffle” button above playlists and a “play” button above albums. Even that’s relatively new: Up until late last year, the shuffle button was the default across albums too. The fact that curated music albums were usually played in random order caused annoyance for many artists.
“It’s not for nothing that we think so much about the order of the songs on our albums. Our stories should be heard the way we intended,” wrote the English singer Adele. In the free mode of Spotify, only random playback will be possible in the future – both for albums and playlists.
In Austria, Spotify is meanwhile increasing the prices for its family subscription: from August 1, it will cost 17 euros per month instead of the previous 15 euros. Spotify Duo will cost 14 instead of 13 euros as before. It is unclear whether and when Spotify will also raise prices in Germany.
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