What To Do When The Solution Comes To You (Spotify's AI DJ)

I decided this morning that I wanted to improve the music in my life. It's not a big deal. I just like improving things. Music is a pretty fundamental thing.

It came to my attention this morning that my music listening could use some improvement. I'm basically listening to the same songs all the time. Eventually, I get sick of them. Then I find new ones, and I get sick of those too.

I love music -- all sorts of it -- and I know what I like when I hear it, but I don't like how I end up listening to the same few songs or artists essentially on repeat. I know that this is probably because I have not had a great system. In terms of platform, I've used Spotify for a few years. Before that, I used Tidal (I like Jay-Z and at some point in 2016 it was the only streaming service where you could play Kanye's The Life of Pablo). I imagine I could create a great system on Spotify, Apple, or Tidal, so I doubted the problem was the platform. I figured the problem probably had more to do with the way I was using it.

So I wanted to change the way I was using Spotify. The basic objective was to make it easier for myself to listen to more new music (as in new to me, not necessarily recently released), better music, and significantly more variety. I would need to change something in order to make this happen.

I figured the best approach would be to create some radio stations on Spotify and make them easily accessible on mobile. That way, I would be able to see a handful of options and just press play. I tried that with playlists in the past but it hasn’t worked mostly because those get stale too. I’ve had success with radio stations in limited use, so I noted this as a to-do while on a walk: "▪️Make radio stations on Spotify".

When I got back and went to redesign my Spotify, I first wanted to check if there was a different template available for the home view, or if it was configurable in any way. After checking "Settings" with no luck, I went back to the home screen and pressed a “music” button in the top left that I can't recall pressing before. Then I saw this new “DJ” feature labeled “beta”.

I pressed the DJ button and an AI named Xavier introduced himself and told me he was going to be my new personal DJ. He sounded like a real person and said he knew what I liked and everything I’d ever listened to. Without any further adieu, he intro’d Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones and faded it in while he finished talking over it like a good old-fashioned radio host.

It was a pretty surreal moment, honestly. Music is meaningful, and this felt like a meaningful moment for music. I thought to myself "OK, this is great, I’ll try this and can setup the radio stations later". Then I realized how dumb of a thought that was. Forget the radio stations! This was a better solution to my problem than I could have possibly imagined. Here was this brand new AI DJ that I didn't even know existed, still in beta, in the midst of an AI revolution. It felt like this thing ("Xavier") was sent here to bring better music into my life, one song at a time, at the exact time that I realized I wanted to start listening to some better music.

I’ve been listening to the DJ while writing this actually. It’s great. It’s totally personal. It’s easy. It's automatic. It feels like the future.

From this seemingly narrow experience, I realized a more general takeaway. I want to get better about being more open to unforeseen, often unimaginable solutions. Moreover, I want to get better at letting go of solutions I may have had in mind at a given time in favor of these unforeseen solutions that present themselves, especially when the latter are better.

In this case, I wanted a better system for better music. I thought the solution was radio. It turned out to be AI. Still, before the first song had even finished, the concept of creating radio stations popped back into my brain as an eventual to-do. I realized how dumb that was and let it go. Solutions to solved problems are no longer needed! Forget those previously-thought-to-be-good-idea-now-redundant-and-unnecessary to-do’s. Forget the radio and embrace the DJ. When the solution comes to you, there's nothing left to do!