I’ve been a loyal Spotify subscriber in the best part of 10 years and there are many reasons why I’ve stayed with it (my day list is the first thing to think about). Despite this, however, there are several disadvantages to one of the best music flow services – its smart shuffle feature is one. But now there is a new way to disable this annoying feature completely.
Spotify introduced Smart Shuffle in 2023, a feature that weaves song recommendations between them in your personally curated playlists, and it didn’t sit well with music fans – even included – to say the least. Fortunately, you no longer have to stop its annoyance, as users have seen a new way of disabling it.
Eagle-Eyed users at Reddit poured attention to the new ‘Enable all Play Modes’ in the Spotify app settings that were added very quietly. Once this option is enabled, you can silence through the linear, mixed and smart shuffle settings when listening to your playlists. Deactivating it turns off smart mix for all your playlists.
You can now remove Smart Shuffle! From R/TreeStotify
This new setting appears differently for some users (see below) but has exactly the same functionality. So far, it seems that it is gradually rolling out globally – I have already benefited from it – so it may not be visible to all Spotify users yet.
Comment from R/Trustotify
Goodbye Smart Shuffle, we never needed you anyway
Although designed to ‘inhale new life’ in your listening experience and offer a personal new music discovery option, a large part of Spotify subscribers were never heated to the function as a whole and complained that its rotation of song suggestions is missing in different and not living up to its daily renewal. On top of that, Smart Shuffle is interrupting the irritating standard Shuffle feature.
When Spotify first brought Smart Shuffle out, I dabbled in it mainly as a means of finding similar songs to fill out my specific playlists, an alternative way to use the list of ‘recommended songs’ at the bottom of each playlist. At first it was convenient, but the news went off pretty quickly.
For a feature that uses your music habits as well as knowledge of Spotify’s music experts to offer new song suggestions, it is not the most dynamic music discovery feature and lacks scope. There are far better features out there for music discovery – I stand by the credible new music Friday games that are generated weekly and I will repeat my soft spot for Spotify Dayslists. So for now, it’s time to disable Smart Shuffle until Spotify can come up with a better solution.
