YouTube shuffle playlist broken 2021

As of this weekend, several different users and our own testing are showing that the long-dormant shuffle button is working when casting music from the YouTube Music interface. The repeat button is still present as we reported earlier, but for ourselves and apparently many other users, remains broken.

As always, YouTube Music seems to extensively use multiple groups in A/B tests, so don't be surprised if you can't access the functionality yet.It's baffling that Google, a company that's made streaming software for literally decades and positions its Cast functionality as a central part of its smart home ecosystem, cannot get this right.

Previously we saw the repeat button enabled, as below, but now it's greyed out, as in the image above.

Error: Error.

The appearance of an interactive icon is almost certainly an indicator that the change is being worked on, but today's news almost encapsulates the YouTube Music experience to date: If a feature isn't outright missing, it's missing for some people as part of a painfully slow rollout, or it's simply broken.

Some day YouTube Music will be a fully-featured music subscription service and app or, at least, it will meet the benchmark set by Google Play Music but that day is not today.

Alternate evergreen title: YouTube Music almost has a basic feature you expected it would have launched with, but it's not available for everyone yet and/or broken