Spotify Disables Auto-Shuffle On Albums At Adele’s Request

Adele has requested that the streaming service Spotify no longer play albums in randomized order when playing automatically. Spotify listened and made the change accordingly. Before this special request from the industry icon and massively commercially successful artist, Spotify would automatically default to playing albums on shuffle, skipping around the tracklist and and playing the songs out of the artist’s intended order. Adele touched on this in her statement by saying “We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening.” The option to stream albums in a shuffled order is still possible, but it must be chosen by the user, it is no longer the default setting. Earlier this fall, Adele set a Spotify streaming record for her song “Easy On Me” so it’s understandable that Spotify would be motivated to take her requests seriously. The change for Spotify will take place immediately and apply to all albums, not just Adele’s newly released 30

Adele recently released her first album in nearly 5 years, the much anticipated 30. In the 5 years since releasing her enormously critically and commercially successful album 25, Adele has gone through divorce, and that has influenced much of the material on this album. Accordingly, Adele wants the narrative of the album not to be lost on the listener to those who unwittingly listen to it out of the intended order of the tracklist. The last time Adele released her album, she delayed the release of it onto streaming services for 9 months, only being available to buy in physical or digital copies during that time. Fans of Adele found the album 30 on store shelves in Target before the album was released on streaming services this time around.