Randomness, dodging phone bans & astrological strategies

Your new Strategy Toolkit newsletter (January 27, 2025)

(1) Reality bites…

The idea of a spontaneously random order of songs on a Spotify playlist (when you hit the shuffle button) has never matched the experience. Just google the topic and you will be besieged by complaints across all social media, along with a host of workarounds on GitHub and elsewhere. It turns out that users are seeking a perception of randomness, not true mathematical randomness. Who would have thought?

“Perfection turned out to be the problem. The algorithm captured a Platonic ideal of randomness instead of one compatible with the human mind. As a species, our intuitions about randomness are tragically incorrect. Evolution has sculpted our brains into pattern-seeking organs and, because of this, we presume that randomness must always present as chaotic. However, as randomness is unpredictable, it can (and will) at times give the impression of order.

“In the case of the Fisher-Yates shuffle, users expected the randomness to behave in a certain way that excluded any sign of organisation. For instance, clusters of songs from the same album or by the same artist were interpreted as evidence of shuffle’s dysfunction. But a shuffled playlist without clusters is statistically impossible. In a playlist of 100 songs shuffled by this algorithm, each has an equal chance of occurring in the first track position and so on through the list, ultimately meaning it is reasonable (and random) for several Taylor Swift songs to play back to back. When users complained about clustering, or shuffle not being random, what they were complaining about was reality.”*

* McCalden, H., “How random, really, is Spotify’s shuffle feature?”, Financial Times (January 25, 2025); https://www.ft.com/content/a660aee2-06c4-430c-9066-3cb30dd63c46