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]
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.
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.
I'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). 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.
I love classical music, and I am convinced that 90% of the reason people think they don't is because of people like the Charles Petzold. Deriving your self worth from being an enjoyer of art that someone else created is the high pretention.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love electronic renditions of classical music. Trance does this often (Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, William Orbit, Ferry Corsten and others) and it's some of the best work they put out. To me, it's like a natural progression from classical minimalism, such as Phillip Glass or Max Richter.
I've played the violin since I was a kid (only for fun now). I can find something I love about almost any musical genre and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The blend of classical and techno must come from the techno side. I remember many years ago listening to CBC Radio as they breathlessly talked about some avant garde classical piece that purported to blend classical and techno. It was a mid tier modern classical composition with occasional cheap synth sound effects. And this was ten years after Portishead released their entire first album, recorded with an orchestra, or all the work that Massive attack was doing.
William Orbit did an album of electronic arrangements of classical music 25 years ago. Not that it prevents anyone else from doing it. But it's not a completely novel idea.
Remixing art has been done since the invention of art. It doesn't ruin anything if the original work is preserved.
No one is required to like it. But the word 'hate' is a bit extreme, even in your example. Also, the group comprising "the classical music fans" is certain to include many who disagree with you.
I consider myself a "fan of classical music". We go to Philharmonic a few times a year and I own a remarkable collection of classical music. And I do go to parties and love techno...
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.
Isn’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?
As mentioned above, they bought Primephonic, which already had all those features. For myself, I used Primephonic until Apple bought it, then switched to Idagio, in order to minimize my connection with the Apple machine.
I love that app. They have Dolby atmos mixes which seem like overkill but I was completely floored putting on a double bass work and being completely immersed in the center of the sound. Obviously great for large ensembles but surprisingly awesome at solo works
And the play history integrates with the main Music app
building recommendation systems for classical music has a simple data problem- most recommendation systems (for spotify and others) are based on simple user listening histories that look at "people that listened to X also listened to Y".
this is a problem for classical (and jazz) for two reasons a) these genres are not particularly popular on the platform so there are few unique users and b) the songs are LONG so listening sessions contain fewer songs.
track cooccurance based recs work well for popular genres, but these other genres need a different approach to recs and that's actually where AI could do really well by digging into the unstructured data associated with the tracks (sonic analysis of the song, biographical information about the composer, details about featured soloists, etc) rather than relying on piles of user behavior.
I’m British so I guess the equivalent would be Radio 4. But no, not really tbh. I just find what I want and listen to it. I know some people really like Radio 4 though.
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.
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.
You 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.
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”!
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)
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.