There is the well known problem that "random" shuffling of songs doesn't sound "random" to people and is disliked.
I wonder if the semi-random "universality" pattern they talk about in this article aligns more closely with what people want from song shuffling.
Thank you for reading and understanding the article
Song shuffling has been broken for ages now. It used to work correctly, like shuffling and dealing a deck of cards, only reshuffling and redealing when the entire deck has been dealt (or the user initiates a reshuffle).. Now it's just randomly jumping around a playlist, sometimes playing the same song more than once before all the songs are played once. I have a feeling that money is involved somehow, as with everything else that's been enshittified.
It's not that a random shuffling of songs doesn't sound random enough, it's that certain reasonable requirements besides randomness don't hold. For example, you'd not want hear the same track twice in a row, even though this is bound to happen in a strictly random shuffling.