Be it a single song or a playlist on Spotify, you can shuffle music with the press of a button. Learning how to shuffle your songs and playlists on the platform is incredibly useful when you don’t want to listen to music in the same order over and over again. It allows you to decontextualize your listening experience in a way that allows you to listen to something, even if you don’t know what you want to listen to. Let’s go over how to shuffle on Spotify.
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THE SHORT ANSWER
To turn on shuffle on Spotify, start playing music. Open the song into fullscreen by tapping its name bar at the bottom. The playback tray should consist of Shuffle, Previous, Play/Pause, Next, and Repeat. Press the shuffle button once, so it turns green, and a dot appears underneath the woven arrows.
KEY SECTIONS
- Shuffling songs and playlists on Spotify (Android & iOS)
- Shuffling songs and playlists on Spotify (desktop)
The shuffle button isn’t there. Where is the button?
If you are a Spotify Premium subscriber, the shuffle button is in the media controls next to play, forward, back, and repeat. If you are using Spotify Free, meaning you do not pay, then you do not get a shuffle button. ALL music is played on shuffle automatically on Spotify Free, and there is no way to turn it off. As such, there is no shuffle button.
How to shuffle on Spotify (Android & iOS)
To shuffle on the mobile Spotify application, you must be a Spotify Premium subscriber.
If you’re a Spotify Premium subscriber, start playing music on the app and fullscreen the current song. You do this by tapping the name of the song in the bar that appears along the bottom.
Credit: Curtis Joe / Android Authority
Press the shuffle button in the media controls. It looks like two interwoven arrows. It’s on the opposite side fo the Spotify Repeat button, which is nice because the buttons are pretty tiny and it would be very annoying to constantly hit the wrong one.
After you have activated the shuffle function, subsequent songs will begin playing at random in the Spotify mobile app. If you want to reshuffle, you can just tap the button twice to turn the function off and on again.
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