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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 ab
by sd9 7mo ago
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.
- 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.
- sd9 7mo agoI guess I’m just separating out the fact that I agree with the OP from my criticism of the way the argument was presented.
- bbor 7mo agoThere’s a reason there’s no deterministic recommendation engines. How would that even work? Doing something previously impossible isn’t “lazy”.
- noodletheworld 7mo agoDon't try to deflect with pedantry. The system is clearly resolving the users query. Mixing that with the deterministic “play the songs requested instead of random crap” or even “play related classical music instead of random crap” is clearly not an impossibility. It actually almost did the right thing. …but no, rather than handling the difficult edges cases like this, just do whatever for edges cases. It is lazy. Handling complex difficult edge cases is what differentiates good products from lazy ones.
- bbor 7mo agoYou don’t use a DJ feature(/any recommendation feature) to play specific songs, you use the search bar. Again, a recommendation system that gave you just exactly what you asked for wouldn’t be a recommendation system! Re:”play related music”, yeah clearly Spotify isn’t built for classical music. Maybe it should be — I certainly would vote for it to be a priority for a state-operated alternative! But calling a specific feature lazy because of a high-level corporate priority concerning content isn’t valid, IMHO.
- Barbing 7mo ago>If you press play on the music player on your phone, do you expect it to “try something different?” I expect it to make a playlist containing the opposite of my taste, like I asked! :) (YMMV on how good it is at this)
- lxgr 7mo ago
- bbor 7mo agoThe article isn’t about the DJ feature at all, despite claiming to be. It is very clearly and openly about Spotify not catering to classical music in general. It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!
- mrob 7mo ago>It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”! It does not. The only reference to literacy is the following: "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." That is entirely reasonable and correct.
- Hnrobert42 7mo agoWhoa. Poor form. You give no evidence of either claim in your last sentence.
- BoredPositron 7mo agoIt has Geminis verve the "baffling" was the hint.
- sd9 7mo agoI am human, sorry Baffling is a common word in Britain and the first term that sprung to mind when reading the article
- vasco 7mo agoWhen "me" is most classical music and this is a music platform I think the critique is not unwarranted. They could adapt it with special system prompts for classical.
- sd9 7mo agoProbably 50% of my listening is classical. If I want to listen to classical I just listen to albums. I’ve never had a problem with this. The concept of a DJ for classical music is just kind of weird.
- hnlmorg 7mo agoThere’s plenty of rest stations that specialise in classical music. So it’s not that weird of an idea to have a “DJ” for classical. It’s just a different kind of DJ. Like how HipHop DJ is different from a trance DJ. And a wedding DJ is different too.
- hnlmorg 7mo agoBy “rest stations” I meant “radio stations”. I missed that autocorrection early. Sorry
- johanvts 7mo agoSpotify is still bad for classical music because you can’t ex. search by composer or label of find alternative recordings of the same piece etc. If you know what album you want already its ok, but if you like classical you should really consider IDAGIO.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoIsn’t fundamentally the issue that for any symphony by Beethoven or whoever that there are thousands of recordings of performances? So if I decide I want to listen to a certain one then I also need to pick a particular performance that a particular orchestra did a certain time?
- timthorn 7mo ago> click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist That's rather underselling him. Charles Petzold wrote the canonical reference works for programming Win32 and MFC. It's like calling Donald Knuth a lecturer.
- sd9 7mo agoApologies, I wasn’t familiar with his work.
- singleshot_ 7mo ago[flagged]
- sd9 7mo agoNot sure what you're trying to say. I'm not arguing from authority. I'm just a guy giving my opinion. That's what comment sections are for.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- singleshot_ 7mo ago[flagged]
- sd9 7mo agoI'm familiar with the subject matter. I'm not familiar with the author. I love classical music. I've been singing in a choir since I was 7, playing the piano since the same age, and compose music myself (https://youtu.be/7Tex-OUk6ZM https://youtu.be/7Tex-OUk6ZM). I’m actually on my way to church right now to sing some Howells. I use Spotify every day I use AI every day I have enough familiarity with the subject to have an opinion and express it. I'm sorry that I haven't read the author's book.
- WickyNilliams 7mo agoMr Petzold's book, Code, is marvel and you should read it btw
- technothrasher 7mo ago> For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error. That isn't really a category error. It's more begging the question. It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the same ability as being able to compose music, and uses that assumption to suggest the conclusion that a failure to DJ classical movement would necessarily result in the failure to compose same. A category error would be assigning a property to AI that it cannot have. It would look more like, "if AI can't DJ music, we have no way to know what color it is."
- navaed01 7mo agoI’m fairly certain Spotify’s core meta data adheres to the US music industry largely set / reinforby Nielsen. I’m curious why the author would want to happen with the feature if not move from 1 artist to another
- oasisbob 7mo agoFor chart reporting? Am unfamiliar with the Nielsen standard, but given the state of musical metadata more broadly it's probably not very sophisticated. Would expect any provider like Spotify to just export the reports Nielsen requires, not design their core systems around it.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo ago> It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the same ability as being able to compose music And yet an awful lot of musicians are also DJs. It's almost like spending a lot of time playing music and watching how people react to it give you a good sense of how the underlying processes of creating it can work.
- dalmo3 7mo agoGP was obviously talking about AI's abilities, not people's.
- smelendez 7mo ago
- DonHopkins 7mo agoThere is a long history of using AI to analyze, compose, and perform music. Atari Cambridge Research- part 5: David Levitt shows Music Box on his Lisp Machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys Atari Cambridge Research- part 6: Music box with Tom Trobaugh and drum machine with Jim Davis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s Cynthia Solomon has shared a treasure trove of rare classic videos of Seymour Papert, Marvin and Margaret Minsky, kids programming Logo and playing with turtles, and many other amazing things at the MIT AI Lab, MIT Media Lab, and Atari Cambridge Research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604629
- raincole 7mo ago> For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error. Given the author's background I believe it's intentional ragebait. It's as ridiculous as saying LLM can't count the number of Rs so it cannot generate grammatically correct sentences. No way he really thinks the logic is sound.
- WarmWash 7mo agoSpotify's DJ also isn't an LLM. It's just a shuffle with structured interludes and a TTS engine. IIRC it launched in early 2023 and has been the same since.
- snoman 7mo agoThat explains why it is always/only wanting to play stuff that I listened to recently, or in 2023.
- hansmayer 7mo ago[flagged]
- raincole 7mo ago> Given the author's background
- alberto467 7mo agoWho would even DJ on classical music? If you have the slightest knowledge of classical music you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoI think you could pick out a movement from this and then a movement from that. I can see somebody wanting to have classical music playing all day without having to pick out specific tracks, like listening to the radio.
- alberto467 7mo agoI think the auto DJ feature is already well capable of that: having tracks playing the all day. But if you want to preserve the original composition of classical music, you have to play the track start to finish, preferably with a small pause between tracks as well.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoI have to admit that my rock and pop music listening is still album-oriented whether it is The Kinks or The Super Furry Animals or Charlie XCX.
- pimeys 7mo agoAnd then we have artists such as Gas who famously mixed classical with dub techno.
- alberto467 7mo agoInteresting, i never heard of anything similar before, but i'm quite sure the classical music fans would also hate on him for ruining the original compositions.
- pimeys 7mo ago
- michaelbuckbee 7mo agoPerhaps not so strange in that from a practical standpoint many "AI problems" are actually "Data Problems" when you start peeling things back.
- Copyrightest 7mo ago[dead]
- leoc 7mo ago> There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end. Google’s Nest speakers have or had similar issues: they’d start any requested piece of (at least multi-movement) classical music somewhere in the middle and simply defy any instructions to start at the beginning, bizarre behaviour for a smart speaker.
- jrjeksjd8d 7mo agoEvery modern streaming platform seems to be focused on the relationship between contemporary singles - who featured on what, what's trending, if you like this current pop artist you'll like this other one. Setting aside OP's interest in classical music this approach doesn't even work for popular music from the 60s to 90s when the primary format was the album. God help you if you try to use voice commands to play Help! (the album by the Beatles) and instead get Help! (the title track by the Beatles).
- jrm4 7mo agoI think quite the opposite for precisely the reason you're saying? Which is to say, he's doing a very good job of reminding you/us nerds that "there should be no excuse for this, technical or otherwise." The technology exists to make this work very well and has for sometime; I GET why it's not working now, but that doesn't make it any less garbage.
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agoThe problem with this article is there are more than one way to be a DJ >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. And I would argue that is one of the stupidest ways. https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb33d41133 https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb3... The Complete Playlist argues for shuffling and serendipity for achieving accidental surprise and delight and clever juxtapositions, something that if you had an actually competent DJ could be guided and not left to chance. A competent DJ makes musical arguments in relation to an aural environment in the same way a competent Philosopher may make intellectual arguments in relation to an environment of ideas.
- gzread 7mo ago[flagged]
- j45 7mo agoSeems pretty harsh for somethign it may not have been designed to be good at. Maybe Spotify works more off lyrics, and classical music usually doesn't have lyrics. I'd love to have AI that could hear music.
- t0bia_s 7mo agoI'd like to have Spotify without videos and podcasts. Simple, but forbidden to do it.
- chihuahua 7mo agoTotally agree. And also, this limitation of Spotify probably affects 0.00000001% of their users. In other words, it just doesn't matter (except to those 3 people)
- pc86 7mo ago> This is a product issue. The product organization at Spotify is a master class in dysfunctional product organizations. Compare the feature parity of the desktop and mobile applications and you'll find random features available in one but not the other. Try to do basically anything in CarPlay other than select a different recently-played playlist and you'll be able to do it 10x faster by picking up your phone and doing it there.
- hansmayer 7mo ago[flagged]
- sd9 7mo agoChill out, you don’t know anything about me
- hansmayer 7mo ago[flagged]
- apublicfrog 7mo agoI have an intrinsinc interest and have been tinkering, fiddling, hacking and learning for 30 years. I've done it for money before, I've I've always done it for fun every spare moment I have. I've never heard of your man here. Does that make me a lesser from your perspective? I'm sick of this arrogent gatekeeping. Why does someone have to memorise names, dates and achievements to qualify as someone who loves what they do?
- hansmayer 7mo agoNo, it does not make you any lesser. But if I were attacking "my man" (not my man), I´d do a bit of basic research. And I´d learn how to properly write "arrogant".
- spunky2342 7mo agoSpotify is definitely not trying very hard, the author is justified in complaining. I had a very similar experience. They are in a perfect position to be able to make something amazing, but they (and other streaming companies) are somewhat limited in what they can do because of their music licensing relationships. I was able to build something 100x better than their DJ using an off-the-shelf LLM and some well-crafted search/metadata tools. It has no problem doing what Petzold wanted. It's a much better way to interact with music than what the general public has access to now, and I would love to commercialize it, but the rights-holders (UMG, WMG, Sony, etc) are very protective of what they own. If you want to know more reply here or reach out to me at info@tunistry.com.
- khana 7mo ago[dead]