There are two basic ways of doing "random" songs:

1. Pick a new song randomly each time a song ends. This is the naive way to do it and can result in playing the same song twice.
2. Randomly shuffle the list of songs once and then go through the shuffled list in order, guaranteeing that no single song gets played a second time before all songs have been played.

The strategies are different, but I'd argue that they're equally "random."

I've got a cheap Chinese aftermarket head unit in my car that uses strategy #1, and it's mildly infuriating.

Reminds me of an article I read long time ago of the need in computer games to tweak percentage chance of success and failure, because if it is true as presented 80% success rate players think it should be "almost always" and complain when one fifth of attempts fail.

Same thing happened with the iPhone shuffle. People complained it wasn't "random enough" and would often end up calling members of the same family and/or household in a row. So they rewrote that algorithm too.

Those were the best days of Apple. Steve Jobs literally titled the feature "Less Random".

It’s not just about not wanting random, but randomness is actually very hard to create. Every random number is actual pseudo random

Some basic breakdowns of this concept:

https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/bridle-ways-of-being-excerpt-computer-randomness.html

The problem modern computers have with randomness is that it doesn’t make mathematical sense. You can’t program a computer to produce true randomness—wherein no element has any consistent, rule-based relationship to any other element—because then it wouldn’t be random. There would always be some underlying structure to the randomness, some mathematics of its generation, which would allow you to reverse-engineer and re-create it. Ergo: not random.

Kid friendly version:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/633085

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why they got rid of playlist radio. It makes Spotify so much worse and I can't imagine it saves them any money

For the same reason all the streaming sites decided to gimp their discoverability and just force you into whatever the algorithm thinks you need.

Some middle manager wanted to justify their bonus so they jumped in the current fad

I'm pretty sure this is wrong. From what I understand, automix just blends together the ending and beginning of the two songs. For example if there's silence at the end of one song, or 'compatible' music, the 'ai' will try to smooth out the transition like a dj would while making a mix.

Edit: yup, that's what it is https://support.spotify.com/ca-en/article/tracks-transitions/

I doubt it. True random shuffle play is rare, because humans don't understand the chaos of true random generation, we see patterns in it and assume it's not random.

A truly random shuffle can play the same song twice. A truly random shuffle can play multiple songs from the same artist in a row. In the fullness of time all of these will happen with a true random shuffle.

Nothing does that these days. Nearly everything "random" is algorithmically engineered to be less random so it feels more random to humans.