Commentary

Spotify’s DJ Feature Unsettles Me (And Why I Was Wrong to Hate It)

By Ben Stockton

Published June 16, 2024

I’ve started using the Spotify DJ feature, but my first reaction was more horror than joy. I was wrong to hate it, though: here’s why.

When I’m driving, my partner is the car DJ—she controls the playlists that we listen to. It was through this that we both discovered Spotify had introduced a DJ feature in 2023. I’d heard about it before, but I hadn’t really given it a go myself. After all, I know what I like to listen to and so does my girlfriend, and we don’t need an AI to work it out for us.

Still, as an experiment, we tried it, but it left me unsettled. It took me a while to understand why. Maybe it was the uncomfortably close-to-real sounding voice or the way it ‘explained’ the choices it was making, but there was something I didn’t like. It took me a while to realize why I was wrong to feel that way.

Spotify knows too much

When you start up a DJ session on Spotify, it talks to you—directly. It refers to you by name, it talks about songs or artists that you’ve listened to, and it explains what it’s going to do. The speech itself is very impressive, but for me, it boils down to a single issue: Spotify knows too much about me.

You can request a log of your Spotify streaming history, right from the very start

I’ve had a Spotify account for over 10 years. That’s thousands upon thousands of hours of songs that I’ve listened to. It knows my tastes, my habits, my moods, and in DJ form, it (rather uncomfortably) tells me about them and plans a custom playlist around them. I’ve sacrificed my privacy for convenience on a monthly subscription.

The worst part about this is that I already know this. I try to bypass it by listening to Spotify in private mode a lot of the time, but even that isn’t enough to stop Spotify from building a picture of my likes and music interests.

The DJ feature in Spotify is just another name for AI

As I’ve mentioned, the AI mode is very impressive. The voice is based on a Spotify employee called Xavier ‘X’ Jernigan. It (he?) talks to you with clarity and, other than a bit of flatness in the voice, you’d be hard-pressed to know it was an AI. 

The Instagram profile for the voice of Spotify DJ, Xavier Jernigan

At the end of the day, though, it’s still an AI system. The speech generated is being created by an AI model, using OpenAI technology among others to do so. It’s using my personal data as the blueprint. It refers to me by my name, talks about the artists I listen to, and then brings up other artists or songs that I might have listened to in the past, or might want to listen to now.

You could argue that this is harmless. This DJ feature Spotify has created is a personal music playlist, not Skynet. Most of the time you don’t hear it, other than when it decides to switch things up. However, the involvement of companies like OpenAI in the process gives me serious concerns, especially given the missteps that that particular AI behemoth has had recently.

Change is coming (and I’m the Luddite)

The problem isn’t with Spotify’s DJ feature, though. It’s with me. I’m far from a Luddite under normal circumstances, but where AI functionality is concerned, I’m instantly skeptical. I think of it along the same lines as I do cryptocurrencies and the like, where the market is flooded with tools and functionality that have no real use.

But if there’s one functionality that AI really is useful for, it’s something like this. My song playback history is already there, and Spotify already uses it to curate playlists for me to listen to, so why not use it to create a more powerful alternative that I can listen to and wrap it in a smooth voice to talk me through the choices? 

I was initially unsettled because it sounded so human, but that’s my problem. AI is here to stay and it’s ripping up the carpet as we speak. I better get used to it.

The Spotify DJ feature is good, actually

Spotify’s recommended playlists are usually quite good and offer a lot of variety for me as a listener. Spotify’s DJ feature is just another extension of this (already quite good) functionality, giving listeners like my girlfriend and I a way to spice up our music listening habits without listening to the same old songs in the same old order.

I haven’t changed my views. I’m still skeptical about AI on the whole—it’s killing my industry as a writer. I still find the human nature of Spotify DJ a little bit unsettling and my privacy concerns haven’t gone away. I can’t deny, however, that Spotify’s DJ feature is powerful, has real use, and is something that I’ll have to get used to, as we’ve already been using it on every car journey we’ve had since.

Want to try Spotify DJ out for yourself? Just tap the search bar in your Spotify app, type in DJ, and begin playing it. You can tap the DJ button that appears in the app at any point to switch to new music.