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Spotify is a popular media and audio streaming service originated in Sweden April 23, 2006, created by Daniel Ek and Marin Lorentson. In its 17 years it has gained over 574 million users with 226 million premium subscribers and over 11 million artists and creators.
This popular app rival’s major tech stars within the industry including Apple Music and Amazon Music. It now aspires to continue growth through alliance with AI technology.
Spotify’s humble beginnings date back to a program meant to combat issues of piracy among the music industry. The main intention was to create a site for both consumers and creators alike to engage with new music in a legal and fun environment.
As their database grew, consumers craved more features. Users often complained that the same artists, or similar songs would appear regardless of the number of song shuffles.
This led Spotify to adopting methods from Marin Fiedler’s The Art of Shuffling Music and the Floyd-Steinberg dithering process to create an algorithm meant to provide the appearance of a more randomized shuffled playlist, which still isn’t perfect.
And thus marked the beginning of a never-ending process to provide a more seamless and engaging listening experience.
In 2016 Spotify introduced the Premium Subscription service, which enabled users to access benefits like disabling ads between songs and offline listening for a monthly fee.
Within the same year, Spotify rebranded their new “Music in a Year” to “Spotify Wrapped”. An app feature that collects data for personal consumers to reflect on the year passed through the lenses of favorite artists, top songs and minutes listened.
Included is the collection of data in appealing graphics to share across social media platform. In 2021 almost 60 million Spotify wrapped graphics or stories were spread across popular social media apps including Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.
Coronado High School student Julia Tate, Class of 2025, is a frequent user of Spotify topped at 89,901 minutes listening in the year 2023 (over top 1% of users). And she isn’t a fan of the 2023 surprise feature that could change the way we stream music forever.
The Spotify AI DJ is a feature dedicated to the ultimate personalized experience. AI curates live playlists based on time of day, listening habits and general preferences.
Of course, this sparks the heated debate on AI entering the world of creativity. Ms. Kincaid, Band Director of Coronado High School comments, “We should never replace true artistry with technology,” and Spotify aims to honor that very sentiment.
The theme for 2023 Spotify wrapped is “What’s Real,” to honor the difference between artistry and AI, and learning to honor both sides to take full advantage of these amazing creative tools.
The voice of the AI DJ is the Head of Cultural Partnerships at Spotify, Xavier “X” Jernigan. Spotify aims to release more personalized AI features in companionship with their DJ soon. This may include color and voice changes.
At its core, this DJ shuffles and suggests songs better than any other algorithm implemented in the past. In fact, the more you direct or skip songs, the more the program learns about your preferences as an individual.
Although the use of AI in music is fairly new and rapidly developing, we can count on our AI DJs to help us explore the world around us. From artist to artist and song to song, AI learns more about you, to help you learn more about yourself.
