Artists certainly have a huge impact on streaming music services. But Adele seems to have more power than most. BBC News reports that after Adele’s pressure on the company with the release of her new album 30, Spotify has removed the shuffle button from all album pages. Albums should be listened to “as the artists intended” while telling “a story”, the singer explained in a tweet.
You can still choose to listen to an album in a shuffle using the controls for individual songs. Basically, with this change, an extra step is added to mixed listening, forcing the listeners to choose the first track. Competitors like Apple Music still let you tap the “shuffle” button from an album page.
There is no doubt that some albums, including 30, need to be played in sequence. Because it weaves a narrative around an important time in Adele’s life. But critics have already expressed concern about removing a feature to please an artist. But there’s a big difference between suggesting albums play a certain way and taking control away from listeners to enforce that order. In addition, we can easily say that there are artists who are very satisfied with shuffle playing.
At the very least, we can say that Spotify has enough incentive to make such changes. Adele’s 30 single “Easy On Me” broke the single-day Spotify streaming record previously held by K-pop mega group BTS. While Spotify hasn’t disclosed its reasoning, it’s plausible that the company probably didn’t want to risk pissing off one of its most important musicians and losing customers.
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