Alright, so when I’m getting on my bike I usually just load up spotify on my phone, get to the “Songs” section of the app then hit “Shuffle Play”.
This is when the problem starts.
Over the past few months I’ve noticed the service will just give me recycled playlistss that happen to include:
- The latest songs I’ve liked within the past thirty days.
- A few songs that I’ve played a lot over the past three months.
- One or two full albums that I like whole but fuck it, throw them in there see what happens.
- The same exact playlist that was previously listened to within the past 24 hours because hey he might be tired and not notice.
The thing is I do notice. I don’t want to listen to mere rehashes of what I’ve listened to before; if I really wanted that I would go just go listen to Pandora or regular FM radio. Just tonight I got the very same playlist I listened to twelve hours ago.
There are reasons for this, I’m sure. Maybe the processing power for random playlist seeds for millions of users is too computationally intensive to actually provide a profit to the company, as it does make money from actual playlists curated by humans; could be their devs are lazy assholes, like most developers I’ve met; could be the company just doesn’t care, as it happens with most companies that are on public stock markets. Could also be the CEO just wants everyones sucking his dick.
I don’t know.
All I know is it annoys me and I’m looking to avoid this problem in the future. But I don’t know if any companies will actually safeguard my personal data should they go public, go get hacked, or worse— go bankrupt.