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.
His 'Annotated Turing' (a reproduction of On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, with explanation and walk-through) got me into CS vs. prior interest mainly in EE.
“Code” is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t usually read 500 page books but this one flew. Even if you know most of what’s being discussed it’s such a delightful ride.
> Microsoft provides two frameworks for developing Windows applications: MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Win32. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a Microsoft framework for developing Windows applications in the C++ programming language. Win32 is a collection of functions and data structures provided by Microsoft for the development of Windows applications. [0]
> 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.
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.
> 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."
I 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.
Every 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).
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.
When "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.
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:
Spotify 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.
> 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.
The 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.
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.
Totally 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)
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'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.
> 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:
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.
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.
294 comments
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.
> 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.
It’s a tour de force in technical communication. A fascinating book for both the Computer Science novice and expert.
> Microsoft provides two frameworks for developing Windows applications: MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Win32. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a Microsoft framework for developing Windows applications in the C++ programming language. Win32 is a collection of functions and data structures provided by Microsoft for the development of Windows applications. [0]
[0] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/article/difference-between-mf...
> 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.
> 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.
> 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."
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.
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.
Atari Cambridge Research- part 5: David Levitt shows Music Box on his Lisp Machine
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
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
> 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.
Maybe Spotify works more off lyrics, and classical music usually doesn't have lyrics.
I'd love to have AI that could hear 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.
And I would argue that is one of the stupidest ways.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Classical is a harder (or at least different) problem and it's why specialist apps like Apple Music Classical exist.
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.
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.
But for classical music: Apple Music Classical is where it’s at, it understands the relationship between composer, work and recording.
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.
Some things just aren’t meant for shuffle and genres that haven’t been properly digitized are definitely 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 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.