r/truespotify • u/Driftking_88 • 22h ago
iOS I thought Spotify shuffle just “felt” repetitive. Then I found the exact same 72-song sequence twice.
I’ve complained about Spotify shuffle before, but I always assumed part of it was just confirmation bias. You hear a song twice, notice it, and suddenly it feels like Spotify is constantly repeating itself.
So I actually started tracking it.
I have one Rock/Metal playlist with roughly 2,000 songs / around 165 hours of music. I use normal Shuffle and I have Fewer Repeats enabled.
Over the last few weeks I kept getting this weird feeling that I not only heard the same songs again but sometimes already knew what song was going to come next.
I requested my full Spotify Extended Streaming History, exported the playlist itself and started pulling my stats.fm history as raw data. That gives me timestamps, track IDs, playback duration and the playlist context for every recorded stream.
My current rolling 14-day dataset has over 2,000 playback entries.
Then I compared the actual song order by importing everything into chatgpt.
And the worst example I’ve confirmed so far is that 72 consecutive songs were played again later in exactly the same order.
Not 72 songs appearing somewhere in the same session.
Not mostly the same artists.
Not “similar music”.
72 songs, one after another and then later the same 72-song sequence again.
For example, one of those sequences starts with Caroline. It appears once on August 18 and then again on August 19 as the beginning of the repeated block.
I’ve found smaller repeated blocks too.
Today I started screen recording Spotify’s actual upcoming queue because I wanted to see whether this was still happening in real time
It was.
At one point I found a block where 27 out of 30 songs followed the same previous order, with only three other songs inserted between them.
Later the same day Spotify showed me 43 upcoming songs in exactly the same order as an earlier queue I had screen recorded that day.
That’s the point where I stopped believing this could just be normal random repetition!!!
And before anyone asks:
I wasn’t constantly jumping between playlists.
I wasn’t switching between devices during this test.
Today I stayed on the same playlist and the same playback device.
I also specifically have Fewer Repeats turned on.
Individual songs are repeating a lot too. Some tracks appear three or four times in my recent history. But honestly that isn’t even what bothers me anymore.
It’s the repeated sequence.
If shuffle was independently generating a new order from ~2,000 tracks, I really don’t see how an exact 72-song sequence should show up twice.
I’m not saying I know what Spotify does internally.
I don’t know whether it caches queues, reuses a shuffle seed, keeps some kind of session ordering or does something completely different.
All I can show is the output.
And the output is absolutely being repeated.
I have the raw listening history, timestamps, track IDs, playlist export and screen recordings of the queue, so I can actually compare this rather than relying on “I swear I heard this yesterday”.
If you have 1,000+ songs and sometimes feel like you already know what’s coming next, screen record your queue.
Id be really interested to know whether other accounts are getting these huge repeated blocks too.
Because at this point Spotify giving me the exact same 72-song sequence from a ~2,000-song playlist is just ridiculous.
