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The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
- sammy2255 7mo agoAgreed. Besides, the "AI DJ" dude is an African American male with no way to change voice or personality. Virtue signalling at its finest.
- amoss 7mo agoAs 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.
- walthamstow 7mo agoI 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.
- stavros 7mo agoYeah, that's where he lost me too. Strikes me as very pretentious. He didn't even say "classical", he was circumspect with "that moste illustriouse of musical traditionnes".
- sambapa 7mo agoBecause most of that list isn't classical music
- cheeze 7mo agoThe entire thing is written in a curmudgeonly fashion, led by that massive list of musicians. We get it, you like classical music and Spotify is a poor fit. That's... the article?
- aworks 7mo agoFor my classical music use case, listening to new releases, Spotify works very well, particularly with the help of 3rd-party services. I follow several thousand composers and musicians. I then get daily playlist creation by crabhands.com of any new releases by those I follow. I then export the crabhand playlist into my own local database via exportify.net. I then create Spotify playlists of music I haven't heard that I may like as well as the released works I like best. Then I score the works I've listened to and feed that back into the system. So I get a deluge of new releases but play it in an organized fashion.
- f33d5173 7mo agoIt's not a long article, and is quite amusing to read. People have such high expectation of free articles on the internet.
- BrissyCoder 7mo ago"wanky" Austraian/New Zealander detected lol
- defrost 7mo agoSpecifically one who disliked The Hard Road: Restrung and Metal in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung
- apublicfrog 7mo agoIt's a great album, but the term was around long before it.
- defrost 7mo ago> It's a great album Sure, leans a bit classical and not the least bit "wanky" (at least IMHO) > but the term was around long before it. Wanky? DJ? Classical? Term Of His Natural Life? .. Regardless of the specific etymological chronology you're thinking of, I feel there are non-wanky examples in the broad tent of "classical".
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- marliechiller 7mo agoThats a term thats used a lot in the British isles too, I doubt its an Australasian thing
- Mistletoe 7mo agoThe Spotify AI DJ makes some pretty cool sets for me, but I listen to Hyperpop and Outrun type electronic music, stuff like that. A DJ spinning sets of classical music is pretty weird haha. I’d recommend just listening to the Classical New Releases playlist, which is excellent.
- barbs 7mo agoGlad I wasn't the only one. Love how he goes on to say how he's aware that people are unfamiliar with all those names he just dropped.
- moonbucket 7mo agoOr someone cueing up well-known pop/dance tunes at a wedding/disco. Last time I was at one they weren't generally firing up symphonies, string quartets then doing a deeper drop of a heavy hitting baroque banger to see the bodies hit the floor.
- SonnyTark 7mo agoMe three. I thought it was an attempt at humor, but I got to the end and didn't find a punchline? I learned Windows programming from his book, I'm sort of shocked he doesn't seem to have a base-level understanding of how transformer models work.. That, and instrumental music. Seems to believe the set of all music = pop songs + western civilization tradition classical music ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Xenoamorphous 7mo agoAuthor comes off as what days is called “performative man”.
- paradox460 7mo agoIt almost feels like he asked an AI to write out a list of composers
- elophanto_agent 7mo ago[flagged]
- cillian64 7mo agoIf you weren't aware, the HN guidelines now include: > Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
- xav0989 7mo agoWhile 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.
- gorgoiler 7mo agoHa, despite all that the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a score. Instead “of course” we are looking for a recording, principally keyed by, for example, conductor (orchestra), director of music (choral), and/or a soloist or key ensemble members. Searching by work is like typing in “Hallelujah” to find a version by someone other than Leonard Cohen. Snobbery sniping aside, I empathize with their sentiment, and their work was worth reading. Spotify’s whole UI is far too complicated and I wish they would go the Facebook route of breaking out the separate products into separate apps. Jumbling podcasts, pop music, and covers — sorry, classical music — is a bit weird.
- spiderfarmer 7mo agoI hate this AI slop commenting fad.
- bspammer 7mo agoThe em dashes are the only thing making it look AI-written. I think it was human written by someone who likes em dashes.
- gorgoiler 7mo agoI am indeed a human. The variable quality of my contributions here ought to attest to that! My grandfather was a typesetter and print designer. My other grandfather was part of Gill’s circle and his bookplate was inscribed by him. My first and only kickstarter in which I participated was Linotype: The Movie. I am currently reading Jury’s Type Designers of the Twentieth Century. I also have Peace’s catalogue of Gill’s inscriptions on my desk. Justin Knopp from Typoretum set my personal card from his digitized collection of rare founts. I’m interested in type and page design and I do like em dashes. But I also just really like iOS’s automatic replacement of 2x hyphens with a dash.
- iLoveOncall 7mo agoThis guy sounds like he has a canister of his own farts that he hooks up when writing his blog posts.
- Closi 7mo agoFrom 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/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c96 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.
- arrrg 7mo agoYour reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case. Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.
- foltik 7mo agoPretty sure they were saying it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ.
- wzdd 7mo agoHe 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.
- leokennis 7mo agoI was about to comment this too. For someone that explicitly states: > I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition (...) And who apparently wants to stream music, it is wild he's not subscribed to Apple Music Classical which exactly circumvents all complaints in this article...
- earthnail 7mo agoEx spotifier here. Classical isn’t harder. It’s just so niche that leadership at spotify never bothered. It has a whole different taxonomy; it’s composer, not performer based etc. Spotify isn’t against new taxonomies outside of weatern pop music. The India launch, where ragas were super important, shows it. But the Indian market is vastly larger than the small (albeit loud) number of classical music enthusiasts. All that is to say, it’s a business decision, not a tech or AI problem. (I really like classical music, too, btw., so please don’t read this as me not respecting that user base.)
- Gigachad 7mo agoDoes it even make sense to DJ classical music? It’s done with electronic music to keep a continuous energy level for hours.
- defrost 7mo ago> to keep a continuous energy level for hours Like a full Michael Nyman concert? - * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3KgZlxTz8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3KgZlxTz8g * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHVU3UlLHRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHVU3UlLHRg Philip Glass's four-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts (1971–1974)? Disclaimer: I'm a massive fan of the six hour extended cut of Cage's 4'33
- comrade1234 7mo agoI'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.
- metalman 7mo agotiny desk you have to do your own search and play, but some of the stuff by unknowns and famous artists giving back is profound, they KNOW when they hit it, all live, mostly acoustic and all useing musicians, no tape, no sequencers. listen to one such performance, and maybe you dont need anything else for a week.
- kgwxd 7mo agoSpotify should have twitch-style, human hosted, radio shows (intentionally no video) with live chat. with full access to the catalog, it would easily bring back communities built around good music.
- herrherrmann 7mo agoNice idea! Let’s hope that some other platform executes this (let’s be honest, Spotify doesn’t care about humans in any way).
- arlcode 7mo agoThat would be good experimnent and could actually work. I would love to try it however they would have to solve "global song availability" and "Sponsored songs only Stations". But if they did try there is the chance of some niche communities forming. It wouldn't even need to be live to begin with. A narrated playlist with a DJ and basic control functionality such as fading into songs or a voice over. Not trivial but doable and I wonder why they never tried that.
- 7mo ago
- jonathanlydall 7mo agoI 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.
- lozenge 7mo agoHow could software engineers in London and Stockholm understand the effects of racial segregation on music preferences?
- jonathanlydall 7mo agoThis not about race at all, for example just because you're white doesn't mean you'd care to listen to Afrikaans music. Even between people with the same cultural background, music tastes can vary wildly.
- driverdan 7mo agoThese services shouldn't make assumptions based on demographics, like location. Some broader examples, it shouldn't recommend US pop music to me because I live in the US or country music because I live in the south.
- spiderfarmer 7mo agoNow please try again with music that's actually played by DJ's.
- mrob 7mo agoRadio DJ isn't the same as club DJ.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoI 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.
- Gigachad 7mo agoMy observations are that the average person is bothered by the slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it. Personally I dropped playlists long ago for YouTube dj sets which are a million times better than Spotify’s AI dj. Some of this is not a tech failing but the DJs have access to unreleased tracks, their own private edits, and are more willing to do more bold things. The AI DJ will never drop a surprise change that makes the crowd scream.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoPandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage. Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it would still feed me junk. This guy is a classical music guy, though, and all the pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly, forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed mixing it in with my regular music. One thing about classical music, is that every performance is a “cover.” Who performs the piece is just as important as who wrote it. None of the selection services seem to understand that. MP3 tags are pretty much worthless. They are incredibly limited, and I don’t know why they have never been improved.
- kaelwd 7mo agoWhat would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate fields for section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.
- lordnacho 7mo agoBut 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.
- mrob 7mo agoThe classical classification system is equivalent to the classification of cover versions in popular music. Of course, most audio software handles cover versions poorly too, but it's not like it's a completely unknown problem.
- snakeboy 7mo agoThe whole pitch of AI is that the model is going to be able to make exploit general knowledge outside of the local scope of the problem, just like a human would do. So I would also expect that it would be able to transfer his knowledge of classical music learned in language training, and apply that to the Spotify database.
- asah 7mo agoDunno about classical, but Pandora (still) works pretty well for mainstream music.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Lucasoato 7mo agoThey should create a benchmark and compare AI against the best possible DJing state of the art: Mexican wedding DJs :)
- shubhamjain 7mo agoI 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?
- qsera 7mo ago>That should be good for at least a few things. Right? The example you described, no. It is not good because its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...
- drdaeman 7mo ago> its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic... Isn’t the same true for a lot of individual programmers and even teams? Especially so if they were provided just a short one-sentence vision instead of proper documentation.
- qsera 7mo agoOh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and was instead comparing it with developing it oneself. Sure, outsourcing is similar, but the difference is one uses a process that is inherently probabilistic and will show up in every result, while other just depends on the probability of you getting a good team.
- drdaeman 7mo agoI suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves. In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app and can’t do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more complex apps (still only simple ones before it produces junk, but progress is pretty appalling)
- oogabooga13 7mo agoYoutube music hasn't failed me and their "beyond the beat" AI DJ/Music bits feature has been really solid.
- Zopieux 7mo agoAs of a few months ago I get AI slop tracks in virtually all YTM automatic playlists, after a few normal tracks, so I abandoned the platform entirely. Call me when Spotify and YT collaborate with Deezer on labelling AI music as such. Yes, it's a nuanced concept, but the soup YT was serving me was extremely obvious, which was easily confirmed by checking the throughput of the "artists".
- igravious 7mo ago[flagged]
- titanomachy 7mo ago> 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.
- isjcusjdisj 7mo ago[dead]
- bob1029 7mo agoI 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.
- secretsatan 7mo agoUgh, couldn’t read it, could the guy be less smug about liking classical music
- sneak 7mo ago> 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?
- xvector 7mo agoAuthor 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.
- projektfu 7mo agoMore like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
- sneak 7mo agoSpotify 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.
- amadeuspagel 7mo ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/@AshishXiangyiKumar [2]: https://www.youtube.com/@smalin https://www.youtube.com/@smalin
- grudgen 7mo agoThis 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
- worksonmine 7mo ago> go back to listening to the albums without AI The way things are going I'm not sure how much longer we will have that option.
- zokier 7mo agoIs hammer appallingly stupid for being bad at driving screws, or is the person trying to hammer screws stupid?
- program_whiz 7mo agoIn this case, I see the author's point. The DJ isn't being advertised as "a narrow tool to select some random pop tunes". If an average person is told this is AI, has a full text interface and responds with "sure I'll do what you asked" and appears to understand, then they expect it to do what it is asked. We're told its better than people at selecting songs (e.g. has the combined wisdom of all music and music experts), basic requests like "play the first movement of Beethoven's 7th" don't sound hard for an average person with limited / no musical expertise. If I said "please play the entire 7th symphony", and the tool responds with "sure, I'll play the whole thing", then proceeds to play the Beatles, I'd say that's a fair thing to point out as a shortcoming. Its only obvious to tech people that understand that the technology has extreme limits and only works well on areas with abundant high quality data and labels, and can't be expected to reason like a person at all in many cases, that those limits seem as obvious as hammer / screw-driver. And that given how spotify developed these models, they probably didn't really intend classical or test that area -- so it fails despite sounding confident. But maybe we should stop advertising screwdrivers as universal intelligence? There's a lot of mott and bailey going on. When AI makes mistakes its "just tools, stop expecting intelligence." However, when people question the AI hype its "humans make mistakes too, LLMs are truly reasoning and better most humans already." And "the entire labor economy will be replaced, human DJs will cease to exist.".
- memcg 7mo agoI worked for a man who hammered wood screws most of the way in and then finished with a screw driver because "the threads made by that last few turns were enough."
- danmaz74 7mo agoAs a Spotify user, I often wonder how much they're constrained in their choices by their contracts with music publishers. As an example, the fact that you don't have an option to downvote a song - ie, signaling that you don't want to hear it - is such a feature gap that I can't believe it's there by choice. I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.
- binarymax 7mo agoIIRC you can tell Spotify to never play a certain track, but I think only as part of a playlist…and it’s buried in hidden options.
- sd9 7mo agoWhat 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.
- BoredPositron 7mo ago[flagged]
- sd9 7mo agoThe Spotify DJ feature is terrible, I agree. That doesn’t mean I find the linked article compelling.
- noodletheworld 7mo agoWhat a baffling take. There is no confusion as to which “AI” the OP is referring to. The author wrote: > Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility? They are pondering, in general, if the non deterministic nature of AI is an excuse for bad products. The Spotify DJ is a recommendation engine. Its bad. Its a lazy, bad implementation that relies on AI, instead of deterministic algorithms; eg. identify requested music and play it. Instead it wants to “try something different”. If you press play on the music player on your phone, do you expect it to “try something different?” …or, is AI making developers and product managers lazy? It is not a complicated take, and the example is, to me, pretty compelling.
- raziefx 7mo ago[dead]
- Razengan 7mo agoIt'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.
- keiferski 7mo agoAI 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.
- ArtRichards 7mo agoI like using the automatic lists in soundcloud to discover new music. Often its hit or miss but it can surface some great tracks... Its intentional though, gotta have your finger on the skip track and heart...
- keiferski 7mo agoRight but a good DJ introduces you to new music while fitting the track into the set as a whole. It’s not a random music discovery process, and oftentimes I’ll end up mostly preferring to listen to a song as a part of the set, not individually. To use the food analogy again: sure, if you just eat random things on the menu, you might find new foods that you enjoy. But it’ll be a much better experience if the chef / restaurant is introducing you to new foods in an intelligent way, not randomly or “We see you like chicken, so try this other chicken dish.”
- twelve40 7mo agono idea how spotify ai specifically works (i don't use that service) but: > fitting the track into the set as a whole. It’s not a random music discovery process there have been plenty of attempts to analyze music and to automate track matching like the music genome (going back to '99) and while human DJ's definitely have their place (i actually listen to lots of those) it's not inconceivable that a lot of modern music could also be mixed and matched automatically with at least half-decent (to a human) results. P.S. found the article itself pretty funny - like a nerdy, methodical complaint, just funny to read
- DonHopkins 7mo agoA lot of this discussion makes more sense if you know the history of The Echo Nest and their acquisition by Spotify. The Echo Nest was one of the most interesting music-tech companies ever built: a music intelligence platform spun out of MIT that analyzed audio, metadata, web text, artist similarity, genre structure, and playlist construction. Spotify bought them in 2014 specifically to strengthen music discovery and recommendation. At the time, Spotify said the deal would let it use The Echo Nest's "in depth musical understanding and tools for curation", and even said the Echo Nest API would remain "free and open" for developers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest https://news.cision.com/spotify/r/spotify-acquires-the-echo-nest%2Cc9547435 https://news.cision.com/spotify/r/spotify-acquires-the-echo-... If you ever used the old Echo Nest APIs, Remix SDK, demos, Music Hack Day projects, or Paul Lamere's experiments, that was a golden era. Echo Nest had open APIs for artist similarity, track analysis, playlisting, "taste profiles", ID mapping across services, and beat/segment-level music analysis. Paul Lamere's whole ecosystem of demos came out of that world: Boil the Frog, Sort Your Music, Organize Your Music, playlistminer, and later Smarter Playlists. His GitHub still points to a lot of that lineage, and his blog is still active. In fact, he posted just this month about rebuilding Smarter Playlists after ten years of use. https://github.com/plamere https://github.com/plamere https://musicmachinery.com/ https://musicmachinery.com/ The sad part is that the open developer platform mostly did not survive the acquisition. By 2016, developers were being told that the Echo Nest API would stop issuing new keys and then stop serving requests, with migration to Spotify’s API instead. Community discussions at the time also noted that some Echo Nest capabilities, especially things like Rosetta-style cross-service mapping, were not really carried over. https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/1920 https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/1920 That's also why Spotify's current AI DJ is so frustrating. The problem is that "AI DJ" is not the same thing as a system that deeply understands musical structure, discography semantics, performance history, or classical work/movement hierarchy. It's a recommendation + narration layer, not a true MIR-native musical intelligence system. If you're interested in the research side of this field, the conference is ISMIR: the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, which is literally dedicated to computational tools for processing, searching, organizing, and accessing music-related data. That community is still very active. The ISMIR site describes MIR exactly in those terms, and the 2010 Utrecht conference included Paul Lamere's tutorial, "Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist Tutorial." https://ismir.net/ https://ismir.net/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36482468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36482468 >gffrd on June 26, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Mofi – Content-aware fill for audio to ch... >Yes! It was "Infinite Jukebox," created by Paul Lamere ... it was awesome because it would analyse a track, then visualize its "components" and you could watch as the new "infinite" track looped back on itself and jumped from point-to-point in the original track to create an everlasting one. He created some excellent products from the Rdio API, and later Spotify ... and I believe his analysis engine ended up being the foundation upon which Spotify's _play more tracks like these_ capability is based. >Looks like he's moved over to publish on Substack -- there's a recent(ish) post reflecting on 10 years of Infinite Jukebox: https://musicmachinery.substack.com/p/the-infinite-jukebox-10-years-later https://musicmachinery.substack.com/p/the-infinite-jukebox-1... >rahimnathwani on June 26, 2023 | next [–] >However, that wasn't the end of the Infinite Jukebox. An enterprising developer: Izzy Dahanela made her own hack on top of mine. To make it work without using uploaded content, she matches up the Echo Nest / Spotify music analysis with the corresponding song on YouTube. She hosts this at eternalbox.dev. It runs just as well as it ever did, 10 years later. >DonHopkins on June 28, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Mofi – Content-aware fill for audio to ch... >I was working on some music retrieval stuff in 2010, so I joined the EchoNest developer program and played around with their web apis that let you upload music and download an analysis that you could use in all kinds of cool ways. They had an SDK with some great demos and example code. I discussed it with Eric Swenson and Paul Lamere, and had the chance to hang out with Paul Lamere and Ben Fields at ISMIR 2010 (the International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference) in Utrecht, where they gave a tutorial about playlisting: https://ismir2010.ismir.net/program/tutorials/index.html#tutorial4 https://ismir2010.ismir.net/program/tutorials/index.html#tut... Finding a path through the Jukebox: The Playlist Tutorial: https://musicmachinery.com/2010/08/06/finding-a-path-through-the-jukebox-the-playlist-tutorial/ https://musicmachinery.com/2010/08/06/finding-a-path-through... >Tutorial 4: Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist Tutorial. The simple playlist, in its many forms -- from the radio show, to the album, to the mixtape has long been a part of how people discover, listen to and share music. As the world of online music grows, the playlist is once again becoming a central tool to help listeners successfully experience music. Further, the playlist is increasingly a vehicle for recommendation and discovery of new or unknown music. More and more, commercial music services such as Pandora, Last.fm, iTunes and Spotify rely on the playlist to improve the listening experience. In this tutorial we look at the state of the art in playlisting. We present a brief history of the playlist, provide an overview of the different types of playlists and take an in-depth look at the state-of-the-art in automatic playlist generation including commercial and academic systems. We explore methods of evaluating playlists and ways that MIR techniques can be used to improve playlists. Our tutorial concludes with a discussion of what the future may hold for playlists and playlist generation/construction. >[...] Some of the most interesting Echo Nest descendants are still around in one form or another. Paul Lamere's current/public projects include Smarter Playlists, and his GitHub still highlights SortYourMusic, OrganizeYourMusic, playlistminer, and BoilTheFrog. Glenn McDonald’s Every Noise at Once is another major descendant of that tradition: an enormous map of music genre space. Glenn's own site still describes it as an "inexorably expanding universe of music-processing experiments", and the public genre pages now explicitly say they're a long-running snapshot based on Spotify data through 2023-11-19. After Spotify's layoffs in 2023, TechCrunch reported that Glenn lost access to the internal data needed to keep Every Noise fully updated, which is why it now feels more archival than alive. Back in 1998 when I was working on The Sims 1, I proposed in my review of the design document something I called "Moody Music": essentially a soundtrack plus a synchronized semantic/emotional control track that could affect gameplay over time. The idea was that music wouldn't just decorate the simulation; it would change it: influencing mood, motives, relationships, skills, timing, and even triggering events at specific musical moments. I wrote that up in my review of the 1998-08-07 Sims design document, along with the broader idea of letting the game recognize a player's own CDs and fetch associated "moody tracks" from the network. Don’s review of The Sims Design Document, Draft 3 – 8/7/98: https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft3-1998-08-07-DonsReview.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra... >I have some ideas about how the music could effect the game, that I will write up more completely later. In a nutshell, the people in the house could have a cd or record collection to choose from, each record an object that has the sound (audio wave and/or midi) and a “moody” track synchronized with the music. Playing the music also plays the moods into the environment that the people pick up on. Music can subtly effect how people react to the environment, objects, and each other. It can effect their motives and even their skills temporarily. For example, you might be able to clean the house better and faster if you put on some up tempo bouncy music. The player should be able to assume the role of disc jockey on the radio, and play from another larger library of music and commercials, that effect the peoples moods and buying habits. The TV of course is another source of mood altering temporal media, with commercials and shows that should effect different people differently. But the most important part of this idea is instead of the game effecting the music that’s played, the music effects how the game plays! The ultimate way for the user to effect the game via music, is to insert one of their own CD’s into their real computer’s CDROM drive, and the game would recognize it, and start playing it (maybe with a simple cd player interface to select the song). There could be a database associating the unique ID number of the CD with a table of contents and “moody” tracks that tell how the song effects the peoples emotions over time, with "percussion" events at dramatic moments of the music that can trigger arbitrary events in the game (like provoking a fight that was brewing, or triggering an orgasm at just the right place in the song). We hire monkeys to listen to well known CD’s, and enter time synchronized tracks with semantic meanings in Max (like note tracks, and user defined numeric tracks) or some other timeline editing tool). Put the database up on the web for instant retrieval, so when somebody sticks in a new CD, it downloads our “moody” tracks that go with it, and it starts playing and effecting their game! Streaming emotions over the net! Eventually there should be an end-user tool so people can record their own responses to music as moody tracks they can use in our games. This mechanism could be used in all kinds of games, to varying degrees of effect. I’m not saying that music should be the only way to control the game – it’s more like a subtle background effect, but there certainly could be a scenario where you try to accomplish some task (like taming a wild beast) by using only your musical taste and timing. The real bottom line benefit is that you get to listen to your OWN cd collection of music you want to hear, instead of being driven crazy by the repetitive music bundled with the game. In hindsight it was quite adjacent to MIR, affective computing, adaptive soundtrack systems, and some of the ambitions that Echo Nest represented. That's why I was so excited about The Echo Nest in 2010 when I was working with Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club on a music spatial organization and navigation system called MediaGraph. MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc >This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata. >It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
- givinguflac 7mo ago1. Duh. 2. This author is truly insufferable and arrogant. 3. Apple Music Classical exists.
- dmix 7mo agoI've had good results from Spotify's DJ, it's basically just a memories feature on Facebook
- navaed01 7mo agoWhat’s interesting is this feature (Spotify DJ) really excels when you give it qualitative input “workout music that pairs well with a sunrise” - and can deliver stronger results that hunting for a playlists
- dsr_ 7mo agoIn 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 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.
- lilytweed 7mo agoThis 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.)
- satya71 7mo agoIndeed Apple Music Classical or Idagio. Spotify has never cared for classical, because the market is too small for them to bother.
- royal__ 7mo agoThe 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)
- hnipps 7mo agoI'm not surprised. I used the AI DJ twice, on separate occasions, and it played me the same songs, in the same order... Suffice to say I have not used it since.
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- simonw 7mo ago> 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.
- rafram 7mo ago> 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.
- joduplessis 7mo agoSpotify DJ is terrible - just like their Apple TV app (which is perpetually buggy). However, their radio mix feature is so good that it's become the #1 reason I can't switch.
- bronlund 7mo agoThis article is definitely not written by AI. No AI I know of, will be caught dead sounding like a total asshat.
- Esophagus4 7mo agoDoes anyone have suggestions for good recommendation engines for new music discovery? Since I’ve switched from Spotify to Apple Music, Apple’s recommendations are lousy and I miss discovering new artists and songs. Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise. Are there any good recommendation engines, or people mostly just use Spotify for that? I’d be sad if I had to switch back to Spotify but it is what it is.
- esafak 7mo agoBasically it's a case of Spotify catering to a young, pop-loving audience, at the expense of alternative genres.
- struct 7mo agoI 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.
- ohyoutravel 7mo agoJust wanted to second Apple Music Classical. It’s cool.
- Plasmoid2000ad 7mo agoAbsolutely agree on the dumbing down. I'm guessing it's getting heavy use, for many it's probably the default thing to go to - so an easy target for cost optimization. Mine will randomly go "Here's some driving tunes" while I'm sitting still, or introduce to me to "The Kings of Leon" when I have some of their songs liked and in my playlists. It's pretty clear there's not a lot of my data in the the input context, or it's not been improved over time.
- cedws 7mo agoI 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.
- sanex 7mo agoI think calling it AI is also a stretch.
- zdc1 7mo agoI 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.
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- frankdenbow 7mo agoMy gripe with the AI DJ is that it just talks way too much, emulating the worst djs. Songza was able to do this properly years ago which customized playlist based on your mood but Spotify just doesnt get it.
- yokoprime 7mo agoWhy 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
- builderhq_io 7mo ago[flagged]
- lartin_muther 7mo agoI love this. Reminds me of https://playedgar.netlify.app/ https://playedgar.netlify.app/
- SilverElfin 7mo agoSpotify 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.
- fuy 7mo agoalmost all Spotify playlists/radio features are extremely stupid. Radios all repeat the same 2-3 songs per artist, doesn't matter where you start. Classical pieces in radios are always 1-2 minutes long etc etc. It was like before AI though.
- 13zebras 7mo agoExcellent. The DJ is a random number generator. No matter how good the prompt, the randomness is gonna be there.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoAuthor 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.
- nothercastle 7mo agoRoyalty reduction is where I think Spotify is putting in all their R&D dollars
- felix9527 7mo agoThe 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.
- radley 7mo agoI'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).
- hluska 7mo agoI’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.
- IceDane 7mo agoI can scarcely imagine a way to formulate an argument that is better at convincing the reader that the author is a grumpy dude on the spectrum.
- gos9 7mo agoThe DJ I heard in Portland last night was horrible - I do not think humans are capable of creating music! Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?
- ottah 7mo agoWho 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.
- mvdtnz 7mo agoI gave up on this article when it claimed that music without vocals doesn't qualify as a "song". Pretentious waffle.
- elestor 7mo agoWell that was a difficult read. Sure, it is a problem. But the author seemed so snobby about his music taste. Not very likeable.
- Akuehne 7mo agoThe appalling thing about Spotify DJ/Radio is that it starts playing songs that cost them less to play, and intentionally leaves out songs that cost more. Regardless of what input you give it, it will fall back to the same slop for each subgenre.