[feoren]

Just from reading the article you can see how bad it is, and it makes sense that it would be worse for larger playlists. They've completely discounted the fact that when you play large playlists, you don't listen to the whole thing. The problem with the dithering comparison is that in dithering, you're looking at the whole image at the same time. But nobody listens to a long playlist all at once.

First of all, the core idea that Same Artist == Similar Song and Different Artist == Dissimilar Song is already flawed. There are just way, way more axes than that. Getting 4 slow songs in a row in a playlist of mixed slow & fast dance music is going to feel very bad for everyone.

They give each artist one single "random offset". If this is uniform over [start, end], then it would absolutely kill artists that show up a lot on your playlist, dramatically in favor of artists you have once or twice. If it's from [start, end/N] with N being the number of songs of that artist, it would be a little better, but it's still making the playlist behavior completely different at the start (where it's mostly completely random) from the middle/end (where it's "dithered"). If it's [start, end/M] with M being anything else, it's again dramatically favoring the artists with fewer songs on the playlist.

Instead, they could introduce a "ghost" song for each artist that gets shuffled in and then discarded (or possibly some small constant number of ghosts).

[BillyTheMage]

I think you're onto something here. Spotify already saves various metadata about the musical qualities of songs like how "upbeat" it is or how much it "slaps". I'm imagining some kind of K-farthest-neighbors algorithm could make it so that you're constantly being given songs that are as different as possible from the recent ones you've listened to. I dunno, I'm not very well versed in algorithms yet, maybe that would be way too slow.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

In the early 1980s I worked in the incoming stock dept of the worlds largest record store (we were physically separated from the actual store). We had an employee controlled music system, mostly playing mix tapes. One of the goals of many of us was to create a never-ending stream of "constantly being given songs that are as different as possible from the recent ones you've listened to"

We were young and not that well versed in the full range of musical expression (yet). Nevertheless, that didn't stop one of us (me? not sure) hitting it out of the park with a 3 part segue from "King of the Swingers" from The Jungle Book soundtrack to the Sex Pistols "Pretty Vacant" to one of the Bach preludes from the WTC. This sort of thing was routine on a daily basis for all of us, and we delighted in the best ones.

[pests]

I don't even understand the goal here. My playlists are built up around topics and themes - most songs in playlists I build are going to be not very different.

[rspeele]

I think there's probably a different optimum shuffle experience for real playlists like you describe vs. "all my liked songs" where the latter is often what I'd put on in the car by default.