How Bad Is Your Spotify? How to use AI tool that harshly judges your music taste
As the online response to this year’s Spotify Unwrapped proved, we love getting an insight into our music listening habits, and Spotify is the app of choice for most.
Now a cheeky new online artificial intelligence (AI) tool is able to give you a fresh perspective on your music taste - by mocking you for it.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide Ad“How Bad Is Your Spotify?” is the question asked by website The Pudding. Here’s how to find out the answer.
How does it work?
The AI tool says, “I’ve been trained on a corpus of over two million indicators of objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations and subreddits you’ve never heard of.”
The tool comes from American digital publication, The Pudding, and was “trained” by Mike Lacher and Matt Daniels.
How to use it
First, you’ll need to visit The Pudding website to get started.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdYou’ll be greeted with a message from the AI that says, “Hi, I’m an AI trained to evaluate musical taste. To get started, I’ll need to see your Spotify.
“I’m just gonna look at what you listen to. I won’t post or change anything.”
From there, you’ll need to hit the “Log in with Spotify” option to connect your account.
Log in as usual, be it through Facebook, Google or email address. You’ll have to agree to the terms and conditions, which are:
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide Ad- That the AI will be able to view your Spotify account data, including you name, profile picture, how many followers you have and your public playlists
- The AI will also be able to see your activity on Spotify, including your top artists, playlists you’ve made, playlists you follow and collaborative playlists
You’ll be able to revoke this access at any time in the settings of your Spotify account.
Hit “agree” and the AI will start analysing your music. You might get a message that says “Spotify is limiting how many people can use this app at once, so you’ll need to wait or try again later.”
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdThe AI will automatically try again, and will give you updates, such as saying, “I’ll try again in 25 seconds.” You may also get a result that says, “I’ll try again in NaN seconds.”
In computing, NaN stands for “Not a Number”, so the AI will try again, but not in a specified amount of time.
Alternatively, you could return to the site at a later time and try again yourself.
The results
After the AI has analysed your Spotify, it will ask you to confirm whether you really listen to certain songs it has found.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdThe tongue in cheek tool will also ask you to choose between some of your favourite artists with a quickfire round of ‘F**k, Marry, Kill’.
Ultimately, The Pudding will give you some snarky comments about your music taste before summing it up in one sentence.
Some results that people have gotten that they have shared online include:
“Music-to-thrift-shop-to-eyeliner-and-screaming-sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad” |
“Dancing-queen-boomer-relaxation-women-of-a-certain-age-obsessed bad” |
“Local-talk-radio-bumper-sticker-bitch-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-cottagecore bad” |
“Barista-with-a-short-story-collection-80s-prom-only-wears-converse-allstars bad” |
“Sad-in-a-cabin-stomp-and-holler-liberal-arts-hip-hop bad” |
And don’t feel picked on - the website deems everybody’s music taste to be “bad.”