For Premium Spotify Users, Albums No Longer Play in Shuffle by Default ⇥ inputmag.com

First erroneously summarized and mocked as Spotify removing the shuffle button from album pages at Adele’s request, the accurate announcement is far more tame.

Andrew Paul, Input:

First off, the change really only affects Premium users (surprise surprise), so all you plebians not paying your monthly Spotify tithes will still suffer the shuffle. Secondly, it remains easy to enable shuffling album tracks by going to the “Now Playing View” and selecting the shuffle icon. So yeah, less a “take shuffle button off all album pages” as the BBC says, and more a “Premium users get a slightly more streamlined method to play album tracks in order.

Albums used to default to playing in a shuffled order on Spotify, and now they play according to the album sequence — that is the change. Frankly, it is long overdue and it seems silly to me that shuffle was ever the default for this particular play mode. Playlists? Sure. Albums? No way. Individual users should be able to choose if they wish to play an album on shuffle, but it is disrespectful to the art for a platform to make it the default behaviour.

I have read many of the stories about this change, and it still seems unclear how much Adele had to do with it. Alison Foreman of Mashable reported that Adele’s new record was first to receive the album-ordered default playback behaviour; but, when Adele tweeted about it, she quoted a story about how this applied to all albums. I am mostly sure it is not coincidental that the change in default behaviour rolled out the same weekend as Adele’s new record, but it does not seem certain that it came explicitly at her request, either.