What makes you think it’s a coincidence.
I believe that when you play various streaming services, they may customize your playlist based on your preferences and settings and previous input, but it’s fairly obvious to me that they are also making selections based on some of their own criteria, much of which is monetized. There are costs on their side associated with streaming music just there are with broadcasting it.
Itunes and Apple music also have a lot of things going on behind the scenes affecting decisions, how algorithms are written, and what is currently even being shared. Yes, on some of these services, the media you play you have paid for, but that’s not true strictly speaking if you read the fine print, and that also doesn’t mean that when you select random or shuffle that you are getting anything remotely close to pure randomization.
Pre-loaded MP3’s.
Mine is on a flash drive plugged into the back of my speaker.
My co-worker has an old I-pod with thousands of songs loaded on it.
both play the MP3’s randomly thoughout the night.
He was on the other side of the building when i was listening to the song.
Today i happened to walk by the exact location i was at yesterday at almost the exact time (6am) and there was the song playing out of his speaker...
I caught just the tail end of it and turned around i said “Hey, that kind of sounded like the Smokey and the Bandit song”
He replied “yea it was...East bound and Down by Jerry reed”
I was like HUH?
“Itunes and Apple music also have a lot of things going on behind the scenes affecting decisions, how algorithms are written, and what is currently even being shared.”
There’s probably a Smokey & The Bandit reboot in the works and Apple is getting paid under the table to push it.
I learned a long time ago that Random on my Amazon Music would play some songs over and over. And some not at all.
Now I have them play in alphabetic order.