Did Adele Really Get Spotify to Change the Play Button?

Adele has been one of the biggest names in music for over a decade now, and the Grammy-winning singer’s influence knows no bounds. Following the release of her highly anticipated fourth album, streaming giant Spotify announced that they were making a change to their platform — which came at Adele’s behest.

Adele released her album ’30’ after a six-year hiatus

Adele’s Grammy-winning album 25 was released in November 2015 to rave reviews and massive worldwide sales. After touring the album, Adele largely disappeared from the spotlight. In 2019, she married her longtime boyfriend and the father of her son, Simon Konecki. But she filed for divorce in early 2021.

Fans were excited for new music from Adele. She released her highly-anticipated album 30 in November 2021, and despite the album being released months after her divorce was finalized, the album was written and recorded before the pandemic.

Adele was part of Spotify changing its play button for albums

30 sees Adele at some of her most emotionally raw moments. She speaks about the importance of her son Angelo in her life in the song “My Little Love,” and songs such as “Woman Like Me” and “To Be Loved” are some of the singer’s most honest songs to date.

When the album was released on streaming services, Spotify users noticed a change: instead of the default option for albums being to shuffle, now users’ default option when listening to albums is to play the tracks in order.

Adele expressed her excitement in a tweet. “This was the only request I had in our ever-changing industry!” she said. “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. Thank you, Spotify, for listening.”

Users can still listen to album on shuffle if they specifically change it themselves. But going forward, all albums on Spotify’s platform will automatically play in its intended order.

Spotify’s play button change is permanent thanks to Adele

Spotify knew how big of a change this was for artists like Adele who put a lot of thought into their albums’ tracklists. In response to her tweet about the change, Spotify said “Anything for you” in a tweet of their own.

A Spotify spokesperson further elaborated on the changes in a statement to Billboard.

“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,” the spokesperson said, adding that users can still shuffle albums by going to the “Now Playing” view and select the shuffle button (two crisscrossing arrows). “As always, we will continue to iterate our products and features to create the best experiences for both artists and their fans.”