The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ

The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify’s AI DJ February 26, 2026

New York, NY

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?

I pondered these questions after I recently explored a new way to search for music in the Spotify app on my Android phone:

This is the portal to the AI-empowered Spotify DJ, and I optimistically wondered if this would finally fix longstanding blind spots in Spotify.

I should mention that my perspective might be a little different from most people’s because I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Reich, Glass, Eastman, León, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Adès, Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others.

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.

Unfortunately, this tradition is not much respected in the sphere of digitized music. When I explored this issue back in 2009 in my blog entry Classical Music and MP3 Players, I discovered that the metadata associated with digital music files is based entirely on pop music. Each track is identified by Artist, Album, and Song tags.

Let me be clear: 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. It illustrates more than anything how the entire system is designed for pop songs. For music of the western tradition, the word “composition” or “work” or “piece” is used except, of course, if the composition is actually a song. In pop music, the “artist” is the performer; for music of the western tradition, the all-important composer is thrown in there along with the musicians or ensembles performing the music.

But the big problem is this:

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