How To Stop Spotify Feeding You The Same Old Songs

Spotify is stupendous and I’m willing to step outside and sort it out with anyone who says otherwise. However, it’s not perfect and a recent thread on Reddit has highlighted one of my major irritations with the service: its propensity to play you the same songs over and over again.

The thread on Reddit is a particular gripe about Spotify grouping or repeating the same songs in massive playlists, which is something I’ve come across - especially when shuffling those playlists on smart speakers. But even when you’re asking Spotify to “autoplay” songs for you - when your playlist has ended, for example - it can veer towards the familiar.

I went through a period where every Spotify Daily Mix or autoplayed selection seemed to contain Primal Scream’s Loaded, to the point where those black eyes from the Screamadelica album cover were haunting me...

After a while and some serious reading up, I discovered a number of techniques to keep Spotify supplying fresh tunes - still stuff that I like, but not the same stuff every day. Here, then, are my tips to stop Spotify feeding you the same tunes.

Ignore the Like button

Spotify wants you to keep hitting Like on your favorite songs to train its algorithms to your tastes, but I found that resulted in too much of a good thing. Much too much. Instead, stick to building playlists of your favourite songs.

Years ago, before the Like button was introduced, Spotify had a star button, which used to add that song or album to a playlist called Starred. I’ve continued to use that playlist to add songs I like from a variety of genres, while also building more genre-specific playlists. When Spotify sees songs added to playlists it seems to treat that in much the same way as a Like, giving you the best of both worlds - properly curated playlists and a well-trained Spotify.

Riff off your playlists

Once you’ve got a few decent playlists curated, you can use these to feed you new music that is aligned to your tastes. Select a playlist and then click the three-dots menu button and select Go To Playlist Radio.

This will produce a bespoke playlist of songs that are in the same ballpark as the ones you already like. Better still, a unique playlist is generated every time you select that Radio option, so you can keep getting fresh music from that same playlist. And as the playlist grows and morphs, so does the Playlist Radio.

Be specific with Spotify-enabled smart speakers

If you want Alexa or Google Home devices to shuffle a playlist, you have to be precise with the terminology you use. Otherwise, you’ll find the speaker starts from the first song added to the playlist and works its way through in chronological order.

To get a playlist properly shuffled, you have to say:

“Alexa/OK Google, shuffle my [playlist name] playlist from Spotify.”

It’s important to get “shuffle” right up front. The word “my” is also very important, as otherwise the smart speaker might confuse a generic playlist of the same name with one you’ve curated in your own library.

On that note, it pays to be as specific and unique as possible with your playlist names to minimise the risk of confusion/unwanted substitution.

Master the search engine

The Spotify search engine is deceptively powerful. The lack of any ‘advanced search’ facility fools people into thinking it’s a basic artist/song search, but it can do much more than that.

For instance, you can search for specific genres, sub-genres, record labels and years of release. What’s more, these terms can be combined to give you a set of results that perfectly match your tastes.

So, if like me, you’ve got a penchant for Britpop from 1995 to 1998 (my university years), you can type the following into the search engine:

genre:britpop AND year:1995-1998

And get a huge list of songs that match that search:

Those search results can then be shuffled, so you don’t have to sit through six Oasis hits on the spin, for example. Alternatively, you can copy those songs into a playlist and then use Playlist Radio to spin a new selection of related songs from that specific list.

The search tags you can use on Spotify are:

year:

genre:

label:

And you can refine the search with the following operators:

AND (or +)

OR

NOT (or -)

Finally, click here for a full list of the Spotify music genres/sub-genres that you can insert into your searches. There are almost 4,500 of them. Albanian iso polyphony, anyone?

Dig into artist bios

One of the less noticeable features of Spotify is the artist biographies, which you can find by clicking on any artist’s name and then selecting the About tab. These are detailed, well written and filled with links to related artists, which can help send you down wonderful Spotify wormholes of discovery.

Like playlists, artists can be used to generate automated Radio playlists - starting one of these on an artist related to one of your favorites is a great way to discover music that’s tuned to your tastes.

Reverse the order of Spotify playlists

By default, Spotify will compile playlists in chronological order, with songs you added first at the top. However, if you’re compiling a playlist of songs you like (such as my Starred playlist), you’ll end up playing the same songs over and again every time you play that particular list. Reversing the order brings the new stuff to the top.

To re-order a playlist using the mobile app, click on the playlist, press the three-dots menu button and select Sort playlist. Now choose Recently added from the dropdown menu.

In the desktop app, you can merely click the little calendar icon at the top of the playlist to put the songs in reverse chronological order.