Thanks for posting, interesting article. I do love Spotify, but it could be sooooo much better.

I’ve always found it irritating, and slightly worrying, that there seems to be a tendency for databases of all kinds of information nowadays being being presented to us more and more as hidden, apart from what some search assistant or another presents to us.

This is a trend we even see in operating systems like Windows 10, we no longer know what software, or even what information is actually present on our system, as the only way to check is often to use a search, and the search often does not find what we are looking for, even although it may actually be there.

Ai is obviously extremely useful for categorising and classifying the information, in a way that all of the information could be presented to us in manageable, browsable, heirarchical forms, but sadly we see this less and less as an option, probably due to commercial drivers wishing to suppress visibility of some things.

In the case of Spotify, the paragraph above is a good example of a rule programmed into an Ai art search engine which is likely to be bad for creativity.

If we follow the music of the most successful artists over a long period of time, we can’t help noticing it changes. They often experiment with various genres. So their taste changes. They are the folks creating the music. Obviously they differ from the average person, who is not endowed with the ability to consistently create good music, given that we believe the results of the study, carried out on the very same audience over which it has influence.

If a system designed to dictate to us what we like, is programmed to assume we will always like the same thing throughout our lives, and we have no visibility of anything else, then what else can we do but drop into the trend it imposes on us?

After that happens, who will be the creatives?