US – On 22 February Spotify officially introduced its own artificial intelligence DJ generating playlists and radio-inspired transitions to its premium subscribers in the US and Canada. Inspired by the success of Discover Weekly, a playlist that feeds users’ recommendations based on their listening activity, and the annual Spotify Wrapped, the AI DJ will curate tunes and offer recommendations based on the user's data.
As well as announcing the next song, the AI DJ will share personalised anecdotes, such as ‘Up next, I went back for some of your old summertime favourites', or timely topics related to the playing song. The company’s personalisation technology, an AI text-to-speech engine, OpenAI, recorded sessions with the head of cultural partnerships, Xavier X Jernigan, to capture his tone of voice and emotions, and a writers' room made this possible.
In Connective Audio, we previously highlighted how consumers turn to aural online spaces to compensate for the lack of in-person interactions in a hyper-connected world. As Spotify’s AI DJ knows so much about each user, it hints at a new socialising experience generated by machine learning.
Strategic opportunity
Consumers have high standards of personalisation that go way beyond having an email addressed to their first name in a CRM campaign. How can you use machine learning and customer data to boost personalisation?
