Comment by sd9
9 days 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.
> 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.
His book ‘Code’ is his masterpiece, IMO.
It’s a tour de force in technical communication. A fascinating book for both the Computer Science novice and expert.
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.
For the curious:
> 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...
That's old info. Now there is also .NET Framework, .NET (Core), C++/WinRT and more. In the end all of them use either pure Win32 APIs or COM APIs including MFC.
Apologies, I wasn’t familiar with his work.
I was surprised to see a post by Petzold on this subject. I know who he is. But I don’t think you owe an apology here. I think you made a thoughtful comment. A post like his should be critiqued for what it says, not for the author’s previous work. And, fortunately, other people could give context on the significant work he has done.
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The MF what?
Classes. MF classes.
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> 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.
Spotify'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.
That explains why it is always/only wanting to play stuff that I listened to recently, or in 2023.
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> Given the author's background
> 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."
Also, a DJ isn’t typically tasked with playing an entire symphony (or pop album, for that matter) on request from start to finish. I’m sure there are a handful of DJs in niche situations who do this at listening bars and on the radio, but it seems pretty rare.
Honestly a human DJ might well do what the Spotify DJ does — play a popular piece that matches the outlandish request and then transition to other music.
To torture the metaphor further - it's also a personal dj, with an audience and customer of 1. Somewhat by definition there can be no outlandish requests, certainly not "play this entire piece".
If I told the DJ at my wedding to play an album front to back, and they transitioned to Aerosmith, I'd be tapping a friend to run the music the rest of the night.
I’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
For 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.
> 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.
GP was obviously talking about AI's abilities, not people's.
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).
Who 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.
Why would you even have a classical music station? What is public radio even doing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRR_(FM)
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What the AI doing now is in fact what classical radio DJs do; the author wants a general purpose smart music playing robot, not a “DJ” per se.
I 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.
I 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.
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I think it is totally reasonable to want something that plays all movements from one work, then finds similar works to play after that.
Sure, that might not be what a DJ algorithm is optimized for, but a more generalized AI like an llm should be able to figure that out.
You are very right, using a generalized LLM in combination with good music search and metadata tools works very well for this sort of thing. I know because I built a platform that does this. The big limiter isn't the tech, it's what the rights-holders will allow. They maintain tight control over their catalogs because renting that intellectual property is their entire business model. This makes them very cautious about letting any actually useful AI near their music and metadata.
> you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.
Yet the computer program happily tried to do it anyway. It would be much better to fail with a clear error message than to try to proceed and emit garbage.
Yeah, if he wants to listen to your complete albums, it’s unclear to me why he would be using a DJ feature or expected the DJ to do that. Just play the albums manually or set up playlist. It’s like having a six CD changer and putting it on shuffle and then complaining that it shuffles.
And then we have artists such as Gas who famously mixed classical with dub techno.
Interesting, 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.
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It is not uncommon to have parts of a classical music movement in a DJ set, even if it lasts only a few seconds.
Until 2009, WGBH FM… then they shuffled it. Which went about as well as this tool.
Deodado?
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.
Probably 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.
Spotify 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.
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There’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.
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You never listen to NPR?
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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 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604629
Mr Petzold's book, Code, is marvel and you should read it btw
Perhaps not so strange in that from a practical standpoint many "AI problems" are actually "Data Problems" when you start peeling things back.
> 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.
Seems 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.
I'd like to have Spotify without videos and podcasts. Simple, but forbidden to do it.
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.
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.
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The Spotify DJ feature is terrible, I agree. That doesn’t mean I find the linked article compelling.
What 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.
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Whoa. Poor form. You give no evidence of either claim in your last sentence.
It has Geminis verve the "baffling" was the hint.
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The 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”!
>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.
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Chill out, you don’t know anything about me
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I 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?
No, 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".
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)