I am a guy who likes to discover new music. In particular, new music that is vaguely similar to music I already like (duh). I use a number of different technology solutions for this: streaming services, online radio stations, and even a neat little app I made myself.
But it never ends. I need more. There's nothing quite like being at some public place with a radio playing and hearing music so good that you must know what it is at all costs. Many a time I have made an idiot of myself holding my phone up as high as I possibly can in a loud restaurant, trying desperately to pick up a song with SoundHound. Tragically often they get away, and I never hear them again...
Spotify, my hero
Spotify has a reputation of being terrible for this or that reason, but personally I like it quite a bit. In particular, I find the autoplay algorithm to be very powerful sometimes, and I do emphasize the sometimes. You can load up a song or an album you like and let the app take over after its finished, and what it attempts to do is find similar music based on some black box algorithm that I'll never fully understand. But it can (and does!) pull some really interesting stuff out of the great abyss that I don't know how I would have ever come across otherwise.
But let's talk about the DJ. The beta for the Spotify DJ dropped in 2023: a weird period for AI existing between the novel but useless initial chatbots, and the incomprehensible monstrosity we have now. I thought it was a pretty cool idea as someone who has a lot of trouble picking what I want to listen to. I keep dozens of genre playlists rather than a liked songs catalog, and in my mind this would be something that would play groups of similar-sounding songs at a time--perfect! Here is what the DJ purports to do, directly from the website:
DJ is your personal music companion. It plays favorites you already love and introduces new genres, playlists, and artists based on your taste. You can also type or talk to shape your listening, explore what's playing, and more.
How could it get any better than this? Well, it can't. But it certainly can get worse.
The good
The DJ does perform, at least partially, what is advertised. I'm mostly talking about the It plays favorites you already love... line. It will always play, without fail, songs that you have been listening to lately. There is also a noticeable, maybe even exponential bias towards songs you have played more than once in the past two weeks or so.
It also likes to grab chunks of music from your listening history. Specifically, the one I notice most is favorite songs from a given year which I have seen go back as far as 2022. While this isn't ground-breaking, I can't say I am revisiting the Spotify wrapped playlists from past years too often (ever), and there have been a few times where it fishes out a song I had forgotten about as a pleasant surprise.
It does have some chops for discovering new music. It isn't front-loaded though, you have to be patient (or hit the skip bubble a million times which you will be chastised for). The first few "sets" are almost invariably recently listened songs, and then after that it kind of just goes off on its own adventure, as if it were not expecting you to listen for so long. As I write this, I have completely lost the thread on what the current theme is supposed to be, but I did get a pretty cool song: Bent - "Swollen". It does a decent job of mixing up different genres and time periods that you like. It never strays too far from songs you listen to a lot though. Ever.
Recently they have added a feature that allows you to directly prompt it to play music. I haven't done a ton with this yet admittedly, though I did try a couple times and got some okay results. I asked for a mix of deeper cuts from artists I already listen to as well as some related music I haven't heard before. The result was more of a playlist than the standard rotating sets of songs, which I wasn't a fan of. The music it came up with was alright, but not mind blowing and importantly not by artists I had ever heard of. I need to play with this more.
The bad
Man, does it REALLY like to play recently played songs. There was a period of time where my playlists were stale, and I was lazy. The DJ became my go-to choice of music for all commutes, work, anything where I wasn't intentionally listening. At the time, I was enamored with Alice in Chains's Jar of Flies. I must have heard Nutshell dozens of times from the DJ. So many times in fact, that it became my #2 top listened track for 2025. I love the song of course, but it got to the point where I could guarantee it would come on within the first five songs of any session.
By then I noticed that the DJ algorithm is essentially a closed loop system: it might pull out a song that you've never heard before, and that you love. Great! The next day it plays it again. You liked it the first time, so you listen again. After that, it's over. You will never escape that song. For some (but not all) songs where this exact situation happened, I found I actually got sick of them and started skipping when they came up. How tragic.
Sometimes the DJ will play a set of songs that are trending on Spotify that week. I don't think I have ever made it through more than two songs in those sets. This is probably more a personal taste issue than anything and I like the intention, but I wish I could disable it.
The default AI voice for the DJ is okay, but uncanny and has trouble with many artist names. Very recently they added a whole slew of other languages, so I tried the French one. Terrible. Sounds like late-aughts text to speech voices.
The ugly
The feature I mentioned earlier where you can write a prompt for the DJ? Mobile only. Or at the very least, I cannot see any way to write a prompt on the desktop app. Listening to music on the go might be the last place I want to curate the DJ unless I'm on a roadtrip or something. It used to be even worse: you had to allow Spotify microphone access and talk to the AI directly, which I will never do. If you press the blue bubble to skip the set too many times, you will be called out by the uncanny DJ voice about how you can just ask him to play something specific. Obnoxious. If I want to be a serial skipper, that's my human right damn it.
Sometimes Spotify will get very confused about what its doing and just play you an endless list of "recommended songs" without saying anything. I only notice this sometimes because the intermissions stop, and then I find out I've been kicked out of the DJ for some reason. This bug actually goes beyond the DJ as I have noticed it happens with playlists too, particularly when switching listening devices.
Maybe the biggest offense I can think of is that the DJ attempts to auto crossfade songs with eachother using AI. This feature appears to be ripped directly from the Mix feature on playlists where you can have different EDM themed playlists mix together seamlessly. Something I actually really like, but here it is both impossible to disable and insufferable. Making songs spill into eachother and worse, cutting off beginnings or ends of a song, sometimes multiple minutes. I distinctly remember a time the DJ wanted to play Rush's 2112, but cut off the first four minutes which are largely quiet and instrumental.
...but I still like it
Despite the flaws, I still think its a net good for the app. It organizes and feeds you songs based on your listening history sometimes going back years, and that's already pretty cool as something of a personalized radio station.
For a lot of people, this basic functionality is already perfect. Something to understand about Spotify users--and the vast majority of music listeners in general--is that they aren't listening to a ton of music all the time, and the music they do listen to is a handful of favorite songs on the commute, at the gym, etc. And for that purpose, the DJ is perfectly serviceable as an alternative to just throwing on liked songs again. This also explains Spotify's infamous biased shuffle problems that have been a huge complaint for years: this stuff is by design for broader appeal, and I think that's okay. For sophisticated, tasteful music listeners like you and I this may be annoying, but it's hardly worth dropping the service over when there are plenty of ways around it.
As with any and all AI features anywhere, it's rough at best and horrific at worst. I think overall this is a neat little feature that could use some improvement. For starters, make a toggle between Discovery and Favorites modes, or something like that. A switch you can flip so that if you want to hear Nutshell every day for the rest of your life, you can, but with the option to only be served music you don't know yet. That would be the single best feature they could add to the DJ, in my opinion.
Get rid of the crossfading nonsense. And honestly, while I do like the prompt feature in theory, I think a series of toggles or settings for how broad or narrow to make the algorithm would be a lot more efficient.
Give it a try if you haven't.