Somewhat related: A month ago I migrated from Spotify to YTMusic (Youtube), and published the scripts I used to do it. People have kind of come out of the woodwork: reporting issues, starring the repo, asking questions, last night I found someone has written a GUI for it. https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic The biggest reason I ditched Spotify is that their shuffle play of playlists is laughably bad. I l…
They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works ( https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.
The problem seems to be that on larger playlists they will only use 50-100 of the tracks to shuffle through. Most times I'm listening to music I just want to put on a shuffle of all my favorites and listen. It's been that way since I got my first CD changer. Maybe that's a super unusual use case, but it's my primary one, and I get really tired of hearing the same songs repeatedly over a week. YMMV, my wife for example likes listening to the same songs every day.
As I mentioned above: I copied my Spotify playlists to YTMusic and am doing the same "shuffle my liked songs" and I'm literally hearing songs Spotify hasn't played for me in years. Usually the algorithm complaint in music players is that they are using random rather than shuffle, but even in that case I'd think that 2K songs over 2-3 years, I'd be hearing SOME of those songs that YTMusic is playing but Spotify is not. The cynic in me figured that they were prioritizing the songs by the ones that made them the most money, or from artists that paid for placement. But something about their shuffle is just totally off.