How to shuffle songs?

摘要

At Spotify we take user feedback seriously. We noticed some users complaining about our shuffling algorithm playing a few songs from the same artist right after each other. The users were asking “Why isn’t your shuffling random?”. We responded “Hey! Our shuffling is random!”

So who was right? As it turns out, both we and the users were right but it’s a bit more complicated than that. It also tells a nice story about how to interpret users’ feedback.