Universal Spotify shuffling
April 17, 2013 9:04 AM Subscribe
Spotify's catalog is massive and I would like to listen to a random playlist of available songs, from any and all genres. Is there a Spotify app that can do this? Or some enormous playlist somewhere that I can shuffle? I'm not interested in a radio feature that will play only similar artists. I want something that will legitimately shuffle everything available on the service.
Best answer: It probably would have to be an app. I don't think an "everything" playlist could avoid getting bogged down.
My experience with Spotify's shuffle/random function is that it's not so good as playlists creep up into the thousands of songs range. I shudder to think of how it would perform on a playlist incorporating millions. The sheer volume of songs constantly being added would also make this tough to maintain.
If what you're looking for is a better way to run across hidden gems on Spotify, you might try ShareMyPlaylists.com or the lists of new albums on Spotify from Spotimy, which will give you country-specific lists of new albums added that are much, much, much more comprehensive than any of the "What's New?" functions on Spotify.
Also, as an aside... Spotify has a ton of stuff. As such, there is a LOT of really bad music there. As an exercise, look up the song "Hallelujah" (the one written by Leonard Cohen) and check out a few hundred terrible versions.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:14 AM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
My experience with Spotify's shuffle/random function is that it's not so good as playlists creep up into the thousands of songs range. I shudder to think of how it would perform on a playlist incorporating millions. The sheer volume of songs constantly being added would also make this tough to maintain.
If what you're looking for is a better way to run across hidden gems on Spotify, you might try ShareMyPlaylists.com or the lists of new albums on Spotify from Spotimy, which will give you country-specific lists of new albums added that are much, much, much more comprehensive than any of the "What's New?" functions on Spotify.
Also, as an aside... Spotify has a ton of stuff. As such, there is a LOT of really bad music there. As an exercise, look up the song "Hallelujah" (the one written by Leonard Cohen) and check out a few hundred terrible versions.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:14 AM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
Apparently that link I posted isn't really random - it approximates by searching for a "random" phrase (from a word list of some kind, I guess?) and then picks a random song from the results. There doesn't seem to be any way to actually pick something at random out of Spotify's entire database. I'll say though that the last ten songs I got through that site seem reasonably random-esque, although there seem to be a lot of "25 Peaceful Songs for Relaxation!" type of albums out there.
posted by theodolite at 9:23 AM on April 17, 2013
posted by theodolite at 9:23 AM on April 17, 2013
I suspect that if you did manage to do this, you'd find that something like 80% of Spotify's catalogue is made up of cheesy covers and karaoke versions of big hits. You wouldn't get the all-time round-the-world genre-hopping experience you might be hoping for.
posted by cincinnatus c at 9:23 AM on April 17, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by cincinnatus c at 9:23 AM on April 17, 2013 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions so far!
I understand that there's a huge amount of worthless garbage on Spotify and listening to a universal playlist would involve lots and lots of skipping. But the large majority of the songs would be stuff I've never heard before, which is why I'm interested in the idea.
posted by wolfnote at 9:39 AM on April 17, 2013
I understand that there's a huge amount of worthless garbage on Spotify and listening to a universal playlist would involve lots and lots of skipping. But the large majority of the songs would be stuff I've never heard before, which is why I'm interested in the idea.
posted by wolfnote at 9:39 AM on April 17, 2013
You might have better luck using something like last.fm or pandora (find an artist you dont ever listen to then click "Play Radio" which will generate a playlist of music similar to that artist).
Both of these also have tag/mood radio, so you could for example listen to music tagged "angular" or "mellow" or "weird".
I'm not sure a 'just play me some music with no constraints' app would be feasible or necessarily what you want.
posted by softlord at 11:45 AM on April 17, 2013
Both of these also have tag/mood radio, so you could for example listen to music tagged "angular" or "mellow" or "weird".
I'm not sure a 'just play me some music with no constraints' app would be feasible or necessarily what you want.
posted by softlord at 11:45 AM on April 17, 2013
Conveniently, this just dropped onto the blue, and it's exactly what you want - albeit just one song at a time. But you might be able to contact the creator and see how it works?
posted by Tomorrowful at 11:58 AM on April 17, 2013
posted by Tomorrowful at 11:58 AM on April 17, 2013
Best answer: Seconding that spotify isn't really the tree you want to bark up here. You can create this type of thing, but what you really want is last.fm(which seems to have a much more interesting catalog of obscure stuff than pandora or spotify).
As you said; I'm not interested in a radio feature that will play only similar artists.
last.fm is the only service i know that can *actually* do this. I'd go to "multi tag radio" and put in 3 really vague things. One song will be classical and the next one will be 80s hip hop, then IDM after that. you can go from electro house to german oompa band music.
I haven't really found any other "randomized from a giant database" thing that will actually just do that without playing a bunch of similar stuff.
posted by emptythought at 1:01 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
As you said; I'm not interested in a radio feature that will play only similar artists.
last.fm is the only service i know that can *actually* do this. I'd go to "multi tag radio" and put in 3 really vague things. One song will be classical and the next one will be 80s hip hop, then IDM after that. you can go from electro house to german oompa band music.
I haven't really found any other "randomized from a giant database" thing that will actually just do that without playing a bunch of similar stuff.
posted by emptythought at 1:01 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
(I don't know if there's any way to set this up as a playlist rather than just hitting the button every time the song is over.)
posted by theodolite at 9:08 AM on April 17, 2013