Random music playback of iTunes doesn't seem so random.

Question

Once an artist is played it's almost certain that artist will be played 1 or 2 more times in the next 10-15 songs.  I have several hundred artists on my playlist and over 3K songs, so statistically not right.  Is there some setting or option that I have that would influence this?

Answer 1

Hi,
We could argue long time on this one.  You cannot determine the randomness based on playback statistic unless you are performing significant ammount of trial.
Also, your question was about the odds of having a second song from a same artist within a given period.  Therefore, you will have to take into account the number of song you actually have for each artist and going this way, you are less and less talking about randomness rather than listenning to a good variaty of music.
We could argue but, at the end, there's no setting regarding shuffle mode which is your question.
A few years ago, there was such setting to reduce the probability of having a same artist being played twice.  At that time, I recall Steve Jobs saying that Apple was trying to make the shuffle less random because user perception is not random.  Apple decide some time ago to remove this adjustment (I don't recall the iTunes version).
Anyhow, shuffle mix your songs... I don't see the point of making statistic.