SPOTIFY DJ: SPINNING ALL THE HITS OF THE SINGULARITY

Spotify has rolled out DJ, a personalized, AI-driven product that gives listeners a cannily curated musical mix with a friendly DJ voice offering a bit of radio-like flavor and fun facts. The feature became available in the U.S. and Canada on 2/22.

The streamery’s flesh-and-blood team was pivotal to DJ’s mix, explains Global Head of Editorial Sulinna Ong (pictured with our own Simon Glickman, whose claims of intelligence have always been artificial). “Our editorial teams around the world are music and culture experts,” she says, “and it's this combination of human editorial expertise married with cutting-edge technology that is Spotify’s superpower. With DJ, we’ve put state-of-the-art generative AI into the hands of editors to create a new and unique music experience."

"I’m personally excited about DJ because we’re able to harness this power to tell an artist's story," Ong adds, "to be able to provide context around their work and their songs in a broader cultural arena like never before.”

To be honest, we weren’t entirely sure what “generative AI” was, so we asked our virtual friend ChatGBT to explain it as though we were an orangutan with a head wound. "Generative AI creates new data or content such as images, music or text by learning patterns and generating new examples," it kindly offered, adding, "Prepare to be made redundant, puny human."

Team Spotify reports that early tests of DJ have shown that the introduction of additional facts and context to the music mix has indeed helped spike listener exploration and discovery.

And in case you were expecting the voice of HAL from 2001 (“I don’t think that 2 Live Crew song is a good idea, Dave”), Spotify’s DJ is, in fact, aurally modeled on the dulcet tones of Spotify Head of Cultural Partnerships and seasoned podcaster Xavier “X” Jernigan.

Further details can be found here. In a related story, most of our robot jokes come from 1976.