The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ

What a strange article, from somebody who should understand the underlying technology (click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist).

This is not about AI, the author is mostly just pointing out that Spotify was not designed for classical music.

This is a product issue. Spotify DJ is essentially “shuffle with some voice interludes”. There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.

Besides, AI is not one thing. It’s weird to generalise “This beta spotify feature doesn’t serve me, hence AI is useless”. For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error.

Honestly the whole post and tone are just baffling. It’s mixing up all sorts of opinions and trying to put them under one umbrella, and about 50% of the text is just name dropping specific classical pieces.

I happen to agree that the Spotify DJ feature is terrible, but I think this is a very ineffective way of presenting the argument.

I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's going to have its limits.

Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good for at least a few things. Right?

AI DJs for music feel a bit like AIs writing restaurant reviews. Possible in theory, but fundamentally I don’t really care what a machine thinks, I care about what a human, preferably an expert human, thinks.

I listen to a lot of DJ mixes on YouTube (Hör Berlin is great, for example) and part of the appeal is what this particular DJ picks: what kind of music are they listening to in the country they’re from, how are they interpreting it, what are they mixing it with, etc. For some DJs there’s also kind of a personal visual brand, like musicians themselves.

The idea of an anonymous AI picking an optimized list of music kind of defeats the purpose.

This isn’t really related to the core argument, but I think the author would be better served on just about every count by switching to Apple Music (Classical). The discovery and organization mechanisms are built for classical music first and make the whole project of finding, saving, and enjoying the material way better. They include PDFs of the booklets, for goodness sake! (And let you cross-shop recordings of the same piece by different performers so, so easily.)

I've tried using Spotify and similar services that try to track your preferences but they're just, I don't know, boring. I much prefer the challenge of a human-picked DJ set.

I usually listen to dublab (los Angeles, cologne, and Barcelona) and nts1 (usually London) and nts2 (location rotates). They have 1 or 2 hour DJ sessions (live or recorded) and your hear some music that you normally wouldn't be exposed to and sometimes you hate it but usually not.

I didn't get past the wanky declaration that he listens to classical, listing out dozens of composers.

The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.

I'm pretty sure it comes down to radio vs interactive music licensing. A general radio license doesn't allow users to pick the track they want to hear. They only get a shuffled playback and face other limitations like "can't play an album all the way through". Interactive licensing allows users to pick exactly what they want, including playing full albums, but it's much more expensive per track.

It appears that Spotify's engines use a mix of these licenses to reduce costs. Since AI isn't explicitly user-made selections, it's quite possible that the AI playlist generator is limited to a radio license model for playback, simply to save money (considering the additional cost of providing AI).

> I’m aware that many people are unfamiliar with this musical tradition, but it forms one of the sturdiest pillars of what we casually refer to as “western civilization.” Plus, it’s a whole lot of really enthralling music.

I really had to push to keep reading past this part.

But this piece doesn’t really say anything surprising anyway. Spotify isn’t for classical music. There are other services that are.

From the article:

> Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?

IMO this is a programming/prompting failure - not a failure in the general capability of 'AI'.

We can prove that an AI can understand this with a basic prompt:

https://chatgpt.com/share/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c...

This is a minimal base prompt, with no fine-tuning, with the same user prompt, which shows that an AI will respond correctly by default. Presumably either the AI they are using is a weak model, or their prompt is encouraging the model against this (e.g. maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after')

> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?

Trying to infer the underlying capability of AI to generate music based on a badly-prompted Spotify DJ feature is always going to have it's limits. The proof of 'can AI compose music' will be in the eating of the pudding. AI models have already been able to compose classical music to some extent, and can grasp music theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of quality/taste.

In this article we see proof that the words people use to describe a phenomenon influence how they think about that phenomenon: what they expect, what they assume, how they reason about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Every time someone calls an LLM "AI", their brain faults a little more.

This is the profession of marketing's greatest success: inflicting so much damage on the rest of the world.

I do wonder how people can be satisfied with automatic music playlists. I was entertained by this for maybe a few hours when Pandora was new, but they all seemingly always devolve into either playing weird shit, playing the same 50 songs over and over again, or playing whatever new release shilled crap the record companies are paying to promote. Yet it seems like everybody else these days is a Spotify addict. I guess most people are fine with it.

> Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal?

I wish more people would ask themselves those questions.

Sadly Charles himself didn't appear to conclude that yes, it's naïve to expect AI to be "smart" (whatever that means) and yes, he and many other people get hung up on the word "intelligence" in AI, a field that's been called that since the 1950s.

He doesn't really even dig into the quality of Spotify's AI DJ apart from pointing out, in a very roundabout way, that it was designed for popular music.

Classical is a harder (or at least different) problem and it's why specialist apps like Apple Music Classical exist.

I think advertising it as a DJ is a stretch, last time I tried it, it was basically just Siri for music. DJing is much more than just playing random tracks.

I’ve been wondering if AI could be used to compose a set that rivals real DJs, but it seems like a difficult problem. First it needs to select tracks that fit well together, and stitch them together to ramp up and ramp down energy over time. Then it needs to layer the tracks, which requires an intuition for what sounds good and I’m not sure can be done algorithmically. It also needs to do engaging transitions which are appropriate for the moment - also difficult.

Is hammer appallingly stupid for being bad at driving screws, or is the person trying to hammer screws stupid?

The real problem with Spotify's DJ is that, if you use it a lot, it gets into a feedback loop where it keeps playing the same songs that it serves you up because it thinks you like them. It's pretty bad at finding new music which is ironic because I find Spotify's Discover Weekly algorithm to be quite good (sometimes)

I briefly tried it when they first launched it, but in less than an hour decided I hated it.

Which I really should have anticipated since I generally dislike music radio "DJ"s too and Spotify's AI DJ is trying to be like one.

In particular it would do things like start playing tracks with no bearing on anything I'd ever listened to, like local South African music which is very far from universally preferred here. I also got the feeling it was pushing "promoted" tracks with little regard to what I would likely like, just like real life radio stations.

I also don't care to have some voice interrupting the music all the time.

I was hoping it would kind of be like their other "radio"s, but it would be more explorative to finding more "similar" tracks to what I have listened to, without seeming to get stuck in a repeating play list.

I suppose it's a cool gimmick for people who are prefer the broadcast radio experience.

I do think the Spotify DJ has been dumbed down a lot since its launch (“a’ight, I got you. Here’s some songs for your washing up session.” [proceeds to play the same 10 songs it always does]).

But for classical music: Apple Music Classical is where it’s at, it understands the relationship between composer, work and recording.

Spotify is filled with payola, and their claims about it are intentionally extremely misleading while not explicitly fraudulent.

It shows up in all Spotify-generated playlists, so I refuse to listen to them. I assume their shitty AI recommendations are similarly filled with cancer.

I’m not sure this article is about the right thing. Rather over the last few years of cultivating a Bach obsession, I’ve discovered that streaming services in general are really bad at classical music. Without any hyperbole, Apple Music and Spotify combined don’t have nearly the selection that I have access to with an afternoon of digging through a used record store. When you get into records (especially European pressings) from the 1960s, you get into the heyday of liner notes when they were part education and part advertisement.

Some things just aren’t meant for shuffle and genres that haven’t been properly digitized are definitely one.

But he already explains why it won't work at the beginning. If stuff is cataloged according to a pop paradigm, why would we expect to be able to reassemble it according to a classical one?

Presumably a pop DJ would also mess this up. It's like going to an Indian restaurant and asking what Dim Sum they recommend.

The only reason a human would be able to do this task is that they might be trained in how to find classical music, and they have spent some time learning what is what in that world.

But a Spotify AI is of course going to be trained on the prevailing classification system only.

I asked this thing to play me some instrumental EDM tracks and it couldn't handle the task. I don't think classical music is even remotely viable. Spotify already really sucks at it. Pouring AI on top definitely won't help the main issue which is gaping holes in relevant content. It just doesn't exist on the platform in most cases.

> I don't listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses [list of like 50 composers]... one of the sturdiest pillars of what we call "western civilization"

> The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate.

This guy comes across as incredibly obnoxious. It's shit like this that gives classical music a bad rap as stuffy and unapproachable.

But yes, Spotify and the like are terrible for classical music. Apple Music has a separate app for this, which does a pretty good job and addresses most of these complaints.

> I should mention that my perspective might be a little different from most people’s because I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Reich, Glass, Eastman, León, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Adès, Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others.

There are apps specifically dedicated to classical music and there are many youtube channels for classical music, with sheet music[1], with visualizations[2], with videos of concerts.

Spotify and it's drop-in competitors were never good for classical music. This article is just another rant on this issue, by someone to whom classical music is so important, a pillar of western civilization, but not important enough to look for other ways to listen.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@AshishXiangyiKumar

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@smalin

> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?

Why do people who hate AI think that every use of the term AI is referring to the exact same software program?

It's amazing: How AI can now generate accurate images from a textual description but storefronts and music platforms can't recommend suggestions actually matching what I like.

Instead they're just thin veils around paid-promotion.

This is really going to be a problem for the large overlap of people wanting to use Spotify AI features and people who like classical music...

Perhaps file a ticket for the devs and go back to listening to the albums without AI

Author seriously needs to touch grass.

> [list of 20 classical artists] I’m aware that many people are unfamiliar with this musical tradition, but it forms one of the sturdiest pillars of what we casually refer to as “western civilization.”

> Unfortunately, this tradition is not much respected

> The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate.

This writeup is insufferably pretentious. It almost reads like a caricature of someone that listens to classical.

Prompted playlists is a beta feature designed to cater to most users. They are likely using a heavily quantized model, fine tuned on common use cases.

Is it really surprising that it doesn't cater to the fringes of Spotify's user base from the get-go?

Clearly the author believes that their taste in music is the superior one, and so Spotify not designing their product experience around their tastes is "appalling."

Then you get absurd rants like this:

> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?

Almost like these are two completely separate models, in two completely separate products.

I do miss What.CD and its catalogue of classical music where it was easy to find the different renditions of any given symphony. It was the best I've seen (not that I've searched very hard since then). Spotify leaves a lot to be desired in that respect.

That being said, Spotify is probably not the best product if you listen to classical. If classical were all I listened to, I would probably still have an offline collection in a Media Monkey library as my main source of listening.

As the DJ is an interface to shuffle, and the author specifically wants to listen to unshuffled music the lack of intelligence may not be entirely in the AI.

The article treats this as AI being stupid, but it's a design category error. Spotify is applying rules ("don't repeat artists," "mix genres") to a system whose behavior space is unbounded. Rules are a blacklist — there's always a gap.

Real DJs don't follow playlists. They work within constraints — energy, tempo, crowd — and let the set emerge. Better boundaries, not more rules.

Spotify has to be one of the worst run companies on the planet. Despite all the money wasted on a big engineering organization that believes it’s great, the product only ever gets worse. The interface is awful when you actually use it and find how painful the little things are. At this point I don’t think it’s worth staying with them above a giant like Apple Music.

Youtube music hasn't failed me and their "beyond the beat" AI DJ/Music bits feature has been really solid.

They should create a benchmark and compare AI against the best possible DJing state of the art: Mexican wedding DJs :)

Why would anyone use an AI DJ for classical music? The data model for modern music and classical music do have some major differences, which the author notes. which is why there are separate apps, sometimes connected to the same subscription, for classical and general music streaming

This guy sounds like he has a canister of his own farts that he hooks up when writing his blog posts.

While I sympathize with the issue and have experienced similar problems with classical music, I found the listing of composers and the holier-than-thou attitude (because “pop is bad”) grating and soured the rest of the post.

Author is right about Spotify: it was designed for pop music, and was also designed to de-emphasize albums in favor of individual tracks. The end goal is to remove the artist entirely, and just play AI pop music that they don't have to pay any royalties on.

Who pays for a Spotify subscription, to listen to out of copyright compositions, and recordings that probably can be found easily in the public domain? Might as well complain that TikTok has no feature length documentary films in IMAX.

Ugh, couldn’t read it, could the guy be less smug about liking classical music