Spotify is generating Jewish playlists. But are they Jewish at all?
“Jewish writer Wednesday morning” was the title of an algorithmically-personalized playlist that, unfairly, I did not receive
Spotify has a lot of kind of weird playlists, but this is a new level. Photo by iStock
By Mira Fox September 28, 2023
Today, the algorithmically-generated daylist Spotify provided for me was “road trip revival afternoon.” I hate driving and have never willingly taken a road trip, but I identify with the vibe which, according to Spotify, includes notes of “mellow” and “backwoods.”
The daylist is a new feature that offers playlists not just catered to users’ general taste, but to the specific time of day. And it’s pretty good at it; I liked my playlist. Except for one issue: My playlist wasn’t “jewish writer Wednesday morning.” Someone else’s was, though. And she isn’t even a Jewish writer!
“I actually have a lot of questions for Spotify about this,” Olivia Stowell tweeted, along with a screenshot of the playlist. Entries on the “jewish writer Wednesday Morning” compilation included a song by Phoebe Bridgers, and one by the band boygenius, which Bridgers is in. (Bridgers is not Jewish. Neither is Stowell.) There was a notable lack of, oh, Leonard Cohen or The Miami Boys Choir.
Spotify is known for its oddly specific naming; last year, the platform informed me that my favorite genre was “vapor soul,” whatever that is.
It also offers up mood playlists, compiled by a mix of human and machine. Today, my offerings included: “wanderlust,” for “when you decide societal constructs just aren’t the vibe anymore,” and “coastal cowgirl,” which purported to “put a little yee haw in your laid back.” (Both came under the genre heading of “granola girlie music ??.”)
Despite the nonsensically whimsical names, though, their vibe is still often instinctively recognizable. In “coastal cowgirl,” songs are a bit more indie than country, and wanderlust features atmospheric alt-pop.
But what is the sound of “Jewish writer?” Specifically on a Wednesday?
Stowell, a PhD candidate in her 20s at the University of Michigan, where she researches race and reality TV, had two theories about why she received the playlist.
“One of which is that it knows my location and I drive to the University of Michigan almost every day and there’s some sort of association there,” she hypothesized when I spoke with her. “The other is that I am a big Leonard Cohen fan, and there’s a compilation Hanukkah album that has a cover of ‘If It Be Your Will’ by HAIM and I listen to that not infrequently. And maybe they saw I listen to an album called Hanukkah+.”
But the contents of Stowell’s Spotify playlist didn’t really fit that theory. “The majority of the artists on the playlist are not Jewish. It’s a lot of Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift and Hozier, which are just generally popular artists,” she said.
Stowell’s playlist refreshed automatically before she could screenshot the whole thing — the new one was called “exciting small town Wednesday” — but I made a mini-playlist based on the songs Stowell had managed to capture in an attempt to assess their Jewishness purely based on vibes.
The songs were all slow, melancholy ballads that fit the listed keywords of “soul-crushing” and “poetry” — the Jewishness seemed to come from some sort of sadness or moodiness, and a not-all-that-flattering suggestion that Jews are all tortured souls.
“This feels kind of coded language with the tag of Jewish writerness,” said Stowell. “They are like ‘well, we have all of these melancholy songs.’ Feels like a weird algorithmic assumption.”
But elsewhere on Spotify, things look different. When I typed “Jewish” into Spotify’s search toolbar, I got a mix of overtly Jewish songs and artists, most of which were upbeat. And when I search the site everynoise, a map of all of the site’s thousands of genres made by Spotify’s “data alchemist” Glenn McDonald, the Jewish genres listed don’t include the artists in Stowell’s playlist. So how did the algorithm decide that Phoebe Bridgers feels Jewish?
Part of the reason seems to be that “jewish” seems to be coded as an adjective, not a proper noun — in each playlist, it’s lowercase, while the day of the week is properly capitalized. Jewish, here, is a vibe, not an identity, religion or ethnicity. It’s sort of like comedian Lenny Bruce’s famous “Jewish or goyish?” stand-up set, in which he declared that “all Italians are Jewish.”
Add that to the fact that the daylist feature seems to indicate that more editorial power is being given to Spotify’s AI, and you get these confusing “jewish” vibe playlists. In the past, Spotify’s fully algorithmically-generated playlists have all had the same title — “Discover Weekly” or “Release Radar” — even though they’re made up of different songs catered to the specific listener. But now the AI has the power to mete out titles like “liminal cold Wednesday afternoon” and “boating classic oldies Wednesday afternoon.” Without the same human oversight, the algorithm is making associations that don’t follow previous patterns — and might not be the most politically correct.
Since Stowell posted, several more people have added their Jewish playlists, which include “kindness jewish Wednesday morning,” “banjo jewish monday evening” — keywords included “swamp” — “jewish vanlife evening” and “earthy jewish morning,” which at least featured Jewish folk artist Noah Kahan.
Will we start seeing more AI-generated assumptions about who we are? Probably. And maybe eventually the AI will be able to explain what mysterious Jewish patterns it sees in the stylings of boygenius and Hozier. Maybe we’ll even learn the AI identifies as Jewish too — after all, interpreting secret patterns and meanings sounds pretty Talmudic.
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