An Open Letter to Spotify on the Future of Shared Music Experiences

How many times have you been at a party, a restaurant, or some social gathering and you just aren’t feeling the music selection? Younger folks will tell you that “he who controls the aux cord controls the mood.” But what if there were a way to generate playlists in real-time that satisfied all the people present.

There’s a lot of innovation in the actual creation of music – using artificial intelligence and mood tracking to generate music:

But we lack innovation in actually settling differences in musical taste.

There’s a huge opportunity for someone to create a Spotify or Apple Music integration that connects to the music apps of all people present, analyzes their music tastes, and generates an optimal playlist for that group of people.

Not only would this intelligent playlist generator use machine learning and pattern recognition to choose the songs liked by most people. But it could also discover and recommend new songs that would fit that audience.

There’s fascinating research into a concept known as a hive mind, or swarm intelligence, where a group of individuals can achieve greater intelligence than any single person in that group if given the proper platform to collaborate. Unanimous AI famously used this research to predict the exact score of a Super Bowl and detect lies highly accurately.

I think there’s the applicability of swarm intelligence to the music playlist field, as I mentioned above.

Not to mention, this same tech could be applied to Netflix – an intelligent system that takes everyone’s Netflix preferences and data in order to find a movie or show that would interest everyone.

Does this sound like a service you would benefit from?