The Power of Adele: Spotify Removes Shuffle Function from Her New Hit Album ’30’
Adele has clout.
The singer has enough pull to make the powers at Spotify modify their user interface. The music streaming service has removed a play button that automatically shuffled songs regardless of an album’s track list.
Adele took to Twitter Saturday, tweeting that she had requested the change in time for the release of her fourth studio album, 30, which arrived on streaming services on Friday.
“This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry!” she tweeted. “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.”
No sooner said than done: the account for the streaming service responded to Adele’s tweet with “Anything for you.”
Whereas previously, pressing the play button for an album on Spotify auto-shuffled songs, now the playback defaults to the album order. However, the shuffle feature is still available when playing an individual track from an album.
“As Adele mentioned, we are excited to share that we have begun rolling out a new Premium feature that has been long requested by both users and artists to make ‘play’ the default button on all albums,” a representative for Spotify said in a statement. “For those users still wishing to shuffle an album, they can go to the Now Playing View and select the ‘shuffle’ toggle. As always, we will continue to iterate our products and features to create the best experiences for both artists and their fans.”
Spotify’s default setting has been unpopular with some listeners and artists, but only an artist like Adele is in a position to do anything about it. Her comeback single, “Easy On Me,” broke the platform’s record for most streams in a single day, with 24 million streams in 24 hours.
The new album, her first in six years, is a letter of sorts to her young son, telling the story of her divorce from ex-husband, Simon Konecki, and chronicles her journey to finding inner peace and healing, which apparently is why the singer wants the album to unfold in a certain order.