Deezer staff suggested this place as a response to my 3-star Google Play review, so here we are.
The problem:
There are multiple posts about this topic on this forums and elsewhere - the favourites (or any other playlist) shuffle feature is far from giving an actually random queue of tracks from the playlist. Instead it gives massive preference to what I think is recently added tracks, tracks with some sort of preferential background deals (though this is probably restricted to Flow), and “mood” or genre adjacent tracks.
Which, on its own, is perfectly fine. However, sometimes I simply want to listen to whatever, a chaotic collection of old and new songs, added recently or years ago, a mix of genres, popular and obscure brands. I don’t want to be forced to be beholden to some complex algorithm. What’s the point of favourites then? It’s “favourites”, not “liked”. I want to listen to all those songs regardless of what your algorithm thinks.
Flow itself is even worse in both picking songs from my playlists, and new/discover tracks are repeated so often it’s really doing my head in.
The solution:
Give us a true shuffle/random alongside the standard preferential random. Make it hidden behind a hold button for all I care. But do *something*. I’m truly getting tired of the same songs being played over and over again in favourites shuffle, and some songs popping up maybe once or twice in bloody years. Starting to consider competition or some third party solution.
Or at the very least significantly increase the “randomness” of Shuffle My Music, and of Flow, possibly with a user option to set the amount of randomness.
Deezer is over a hundred million € in profit last year, so surely a simple random order generator with the accompanying UI won’t make a dent.
