Apple’s AI Playlist Playground is bad at music
Apple Music: “What do you want to hear?” »
Me: “Atmospheric instrumental black metal to write about.” »
Apple Music: “Here are three metal songs with vocals, a field recording, an ambient electronic track, and a doom jazz track. »
I’m skeptical that AI will be able to suggest the music I want to start with, but even I was caught slightly off guard by the underwhelming nature of Apple’s new Playlist Playground beta. YouTube Music’s AI playlist generator is far from perfect, but when I gave it the same prompt for instrumental black metal, it wasn’t until the fifth track that it delivered anything with lyrics, and that was the exception rather than the rule. Apple Music failed to deliver on its promises from the first moment and has done so repeatedly.
I was in a metal mood yesterday, so I also asked Playlist Playground to create a playlist for me based on the prompt “modern ambient southern black metal.” Apparently, Apple was only able to find three songs that met these criteria. And one of them was from the group Woman is the Earth from South Dakota. Now, I’m American and we are notoriously bad at geography. But I’m 99.999 percent sure that South Dakota is not THE South.
Maybe Apple just doesn’t know about black metal. So I tried something that I thought was a little simpler and prompted him to create “kid-friendly modern hip hop.” The first track was just the censored version of Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” I guess you could argue that since this is the censored version, it technically qualifies.
Next, he served up the censored version of Kid Capri’s “We’re Unified,” released in 1998. I’m a middle-aged man with a pretty generous definition of what qualifies as “modern,” but this isn’t it. Six of the 16 songs added to the playlist were over 15 years old. Three were over 25 years old.
The biggest problem was Chicken P’s inclusion of “ABC,” which is an alphabetical list of all the women he’s slept with and includes lines like “Desiree, take the dick, she’s telling me to go deeper.” I’m not sure I need my four year old to repeat this to his classmates.
The failure here is particularly galling when the Spider-Verse soundtracks, those of Tyler the Creator The Grinch EPand Aesop Rock exist.
I thought an invitation to “industrial-influenced dance punk” would be pretty straightforward. I was wrong. I was thinking of two specific groups, Model/Actriz and Special Interest. Neither appeared on the playlist. Half of it was just old-school industrial: Cabaret Voltaire, Einstürzende Neubauten, Ministry, Front 242 and Nine Inch Nails each made an appearance. But so did “Blue Monday” by New Order and Irish rappers Kneecap.
Playlist Playground is in beta and obviously some issues are to be expected. But based on my results, I’d say it’s not even ready for a public beta yet. Even when it didn’t fail spectacularly, the results were just plain boring and rarely served artists I didn’t already know. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Apple’s AI playlist maker clearly struggles with genre, geography, era, and lyrical content. So I gave him one last test and asked him to create a playlist for “School Pick Up on a Cold Day with No Kids Music.” I might as well have put the Garden Condition soundtrack (Shins, Nick Drake, José Gonzalez). But at least I didn’t have to listen to Parry Gripp.
