https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/09/07Apple-Introduces-iT...
My prime conjecture now is that there's some kind of caching reason where it's more advantageous for their CDN if those handful of songs are the only ones that're played. Funnily this also happens in my offline playlist, but I guess this is just because the same algorithm is also used there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230410041435/https://engineeri...
EDIT:
> We noticed some users complaining about our shuffling algorithm playing a few songs from the same artist right after each other.
...
> Since the Spotify service launched, we used Fisher-Yates shuffle to generate a perfectly random shuffling of a playlist.
...
> The algorithm is now rolled out to everyone using our desktop client and other clients will follow soon.
Everything old is new again.
mg•2h ago
https://www.music-map.com/info
From running the music discovery websites Gnoosic and the Music-Map for years now, and doing a lot of experiments, my experience is that the chance of someone liking a truly randomly selected band is very low. Less than 10%. But hey, trying 20 random bands and finding one interesting one can be worth it.