Adele asked Spotify to remove the default shuffle button for albums, and they obliged

Spotify has removed a play button that automatically shuffled songs regardless of an album’s track list, and it’s all thanks to Adele.

The singer-songwriter tweeted on Saturday that she had requested the change 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 wrote. “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.”

An account for the streaming service replied to Adele’s tweet with “Anything for you.”

Previously, pressing the play button for an album on Spotify auto-shuffled songs rather than playing them in the order an artist intended. The shuffle feature is still available when playing an individual track from an album, but the main play button no longer defaults to playing an album’s songs out of order.

“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 told Variety 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.”

In 2021, the popularity of streaming services often means artists are all but required to put their music on platforms like Spotify if they want people to hear their music, despite complaints from artists that these services do not pay artists fairly.

Adele initially resisted putting her previous album 25 on streaming, only making it available on services nearly seven months after its official release. The album was the best-selling digital and physical album of 2015, selling a record-breaking 3.3 million units in its first week.

“I believe music should be an event,” she told Time magazine in 2015 about her decision to hold off on releasing 25 for streaming. “For me, all albums that come out, I’m excited about leading up to release day. I don’t use streaming. I buy my music. I download it, and I buy a physical [copy] just to make up for the fact that someone else somewhere isn’t. It’s a bit disposable, streaming.”

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