“One of the core principles for DJ is that it gets, and it gets music culture,” says Emily Galloway, senior director of personalization design. The logo for Spotify is displayed on a laptop computer in an arranged photograph taken in Little Falls, New Jersey on Oct. So now, when you first click the DJ feature, X introduces himself as “your own personal AI DJ.” A group of writers, including Jernigan, get together several times a week to create new patter. “As we were building it, the voice was so realistic that nobody understood that it was an AI, and that he hadn’t recorded the sentence,” Sultan says. Technology from another company that Spotify bought, London-based Sonantic, created a digital double of Jernigan’s voice, so that he can greet you by name when you start up the DJ feature, or even weave in recent news, like when the virtual X honored Harry Belafonte after the artist’s death in April. That voice belongs to a human who works for Spotify, Xavier Jernigan, but he’s not actually recording intros and segues. The DJ feature, currently available only to paying subscribers in the United States and Canada, adds a voice to explain what’s coming next, and why Spotify is choosing to play a particular song. (Of those, 205 million pay for the premium service, with the remainder using the free, ad-supported version.) The better Spotify’s suggestions are for music, podcasts, and audiobooks, the more you’ll listen, or the longer you’ll stick around as a subscriber. Sultan, who joined Spotify from Google in 2019, has an important gig at the company: creating what he says are “515 million individual Spotifys” - one for each user, he says. On April Fool’s Day this year, X cued up a string of Gregorian chants, introducing them as music “that was tearing up the charts 1,100 years ago.” If you summon Spotify’s new DJ feature, you’ll be greeted by someone named X, who can call you by name, and pull up “some songs you’ve been vibing to.” X will occasionally introduce you to new artists similar to ones you’ve played in the past, tip you off to new albums coming out, or kid you. Now Spotify, the music streaming service, is trying to resuscitate the idea of the DJ, with an assist from super-realistic synthetic voice technology and artificial intelligence. If you grew up spinning the radio dial rather than clicking on playlists, stations like WFNX and WBCN, and disc jockeys like Eric in the Evening, Julie Kramer, and Ron Della Chiesa picked the music that entered your head - and shared what they knew about it.īut the heyday of the DJ was in the 20th century, before the arrival of MP3s, iTunes, and a zillion satellite stations that let you soak in psychedelic rock or Johann Sebastian Bach all day long.
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