About Shfl
Shfl is a music recommendation tool — one that depends only on the very simplest algorithm of them all, random sampling. It is built from a massive number of specific recommendations from music critics, musicians, and a few carefully chosen lists from around the web. There's no robots peeking over your shoulder here, we're trying to optimize for surprise, which is why you can go straight from Danny Brown to Scarlatti.
Shfl is a big, densely-connected graph — there's lots of ways to customize your path through it. Tapping on a tag or the icons next to the date, label, or album recommender will restrict the sampler to albums that share that attribute. Filters can also be added manually, and they can be combined — you can filter on African music from the 70's, for instance, or norwegian black metal, or jazz guitar. If you're not sure where to start, we also publish guides to various musical subjects, collections of albums grouped by topic, and there's a best-of section with jumping-off points for many of the most popular genres on the site.
A Few Notable Features
If you sign in, you can save albums to lists, and also save favorite recommenders and filter sets you'd like to return to.
If you're signed in, will save albums, recommenders, and filter sets to your account. You can access whatever you've saved with the My Shfl link in the sidebar.
All your lists will show up in the sidebar, and will create a new one. will add an album to a list, or you can go directly to the list by clicking on its name.
is a menu containing streaming links (Spotify and Apple Music only for now) for the album you're looking at, as well as links to other sites like Wikipedia or Discogs if we have them.
will show up on some pages — this will replace all of your existing filters and filter on the albums in the page you're on.
is similar, but it will add the albums on the page you're looking at to your existing filters.
On the album pages, any icon – for labels, for years, and for recommenders, can be clicked on, and Shfl will combine that filter with your existing filters. The genre tags behave the same way, and you can always see your active filters in the sidebar, where you can clear them and/or save them. Once you have a filter active, it'll be solid green so you can tell at a glance what you're filtering on.
Mobile Apps & Contact Info
Shfl can be easily installed on your phone, and where possible every album is linked to a streaming location, so it's very easy to give something totally unfamiliar a shot. I can be reached by email with any questions or suggestions, and you can also subscribe to our newsletter to be alerted when we put up something new. Thanks, and have fun!
Our terms of service can be found here, and our privacy policy here.