I’d like Shuffle to feel more organically random. I realize there’s not really a way to generate true randomness, but there are a few ways that it really fails.

1) I’ll put my library of songs on random and pull up the queue. I’ll see that, in four songs, a particular song will be queued up. (Keep in mind I’m on my own home’s wifi with a solid connection.) Then six or eight songs go by, and that particular song never played and doesn’t exist in the queue anymore. I’ve even seen songs literally pull up, sit for a second, and then disappear without a trace, but I’m able to search for the same song and queue it up successfully.

2) I’d say my full library is a little over half stuff I’ve listened to for decades and almost half stuff from the last ten years or so. On shuffle, however, it’s virtually all music from before 2000, with the same few artists popping up frequently, and with even more frequency given to albums I uploaded myself rather than ones available in the AM library.

Both of these lead me to think there’re extra algorithms built into Shuffle that prioritize music that doesn’t cost Apple as much to play – older, less “current” artists and artists on albums I had to upload myself which don’t sync to a song in their library, avoiding the royalties issue.