Apple’s AI Playlist Playground is bad at music

Apple Music: “What do you want to hear?”

Me: “Atmospheric instrumental black metal to write to.”

Apple Music: “Here’s three metal songs with vocals, a field recording, an ambient electronic track, and a piece of doom jazz.”

I am skeptical of AI’s ability to serve up the music I want to begin with, but even I was caught slightly off guard by how underwhelming Apple’s new Playlist Playground beta is. 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 something with lyrics, and that was the exception, rather than the rule. Apple Music failed to deliver from moment one, and did so repeatedly.

I was in a metal mood yesterday, so I also asked Playlist Playground to create me a playlist from the prompt, “modern ambient black metal from the American South.” Apparently, Apple could only find three songs that would possibly fit that criteria. And one of those was by the band Woman is the Earth from South Dakota. Now, I am an American, and we’re notoriously bad at geography. But, I’m 99.999 percent sure that South Dakota is not the South.

Maybe Apple just isn’t up on black metal. So I tried something I thought would be a bit easier and prompted it for “kid-friendly modern hip hop.” The first track was just the censored version of Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” I suppose you could argue that, since it’s the censored version, it technically qualifies.

Next, it served up the censored version of Kid Capri’s “We’re Unified,” which came out in 1998. I am a middle-aged man with a pretty generous definition of what qualifies as “modern,” but this is not it. Six of the 16 songs it added to the playlist were over 15 years old. Three were over 25 years old.

The biggest problem was the inclusion of “ABC” by Chicken P, which is an alphabetical list of all the women he’s slept with and includes lines like, “Desiree, take dick, she be telling me ‘go deeper.’” I’m not sure I need my four-year-old repeating that to their classmates.

The failure here is particularly galling when the Spider-Verse soundtracks, Tyler the Creator’s The Grinch EP, and Aesop Rock exist.

I figured a prompt for “industrial-influenced dance punk” would be simple enough. I was wrong. I was thinking of two specific bands, Model/Actriz and Special Interest. Neither appeared on the playlist. Half of it was just straight old-school industrial: Cabaret Voltaire, Einstürzende Neubauten, Ministry, Front 242, and Nine Inch Nails each made an appearance. But so did New Order’s “Blue Monday” 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 wasn’t failing in spectacular fashion, the results were just kind of dull and rarely served up artists I wasn’t already familiar with. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Apple’s AI playlist maker clearly struggles with understanding genre, geography, time, and lyrical content. So I gave it one last test and asked it to create a playlist for “School pickup on a chilly day with no children’s music.” I might as well have just put on the Garden State soundtrack (Shins, Nick Drake, José Gonzalez). But, at least I didn’t have to listen to any Parry Gripp.

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• Terrence O'Brien