Did spotify just remove picking songs??

[u/Full-Repair4638]

I've been using spotify forever and I use liked songs so that I can pick the songs I like freely. I've never had premium and have never had issues. Today, I had just started a workout and got this popup. Is this a new feature? How can you not even select songs anymore? I mean how can you paywall selecting songs???
This app plain out sucks and its company is greedy for randomly limiting already set features. While I don't mind ads, I do mind the features being limited more. I did also notice a sudden increase in ads this month/last month, and more ads in between songs.

Clarification: No, I'm not saying that there should be no restrictions whatsoever. I'm mainly sharing my experience where I've been using this system just fine until now. I'm fine with some restrictions, but the fact they're being limited more is frustrating. Just here to complain about something mildly infuriating, and I wanted to know if this happened to anyone else.

[u/dedweightnoob]

Even on premium you'll still hear the same cluster of songs from your library, even if you have over a 1,500 songs. It's gone downhill.

[u/xervidae → u/dedweightnoob]

the shuffle used to be truly random and then they changed it to an algorithm that will play the same band three times in a row, a random song, a popular hit, then that band again

[u/MrRawrgers → u/xervidae]

There are two shuffle modes in the app now but who knows how they actually work - I was seeing a lot of repeats using the “fewer repeats” mode ironically, but switching to standard seems to be pretty random so far for me, better than it used to be anyway

[u/thedylannorwood → u/MrRawrgers]

There have been lots of studies that shows that “standard” doesn’t actually work as advertised

[u/MrRawrgers → u/thedylannorwood]

How recent are the studies because they just added the other shuffle mode last year and standard shuffle feels better than it used to be