Your taste in music sucks

March 20, 2025 9:13 AM

How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music, brought to you by the good people at The Pudding

This is a satirical project and does not use real artificial intelligence, but a faux pretentious music-loving AI. The code creates a custom blend of jokes from our database paired with the insights found in the artist, album, genre, and track data from your Spotify or Apple Music.

posted by ashbury (69 comments total)

haha, I play all my music from a creaky old iTunes library and I already knew my music sucked

just ask my neighbour, who endured an hour of pipe band arrangements while I chipped ice back in February
posted by ginger.beef at 9:19 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

spoopy bad
posted by mittens at 9:23 AM on March 20

Maybe I’m the exception, but I think I have marvelous taste in music.
posted by Lemkin at 9:23 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

Gave it a go twice, but after some back and forth snarky questions, says it's going to give a final score and just clears to a blank screen.
posted by General Malaise at 9:24 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Why do I feel like we've seen this ink before?.....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:26 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

This was hilarious, thank you, nailed my university residence hipster frenemy's tone perfectly
posted by sid at 9:26 AM on March 20

Haha, another satirical caper asking for your actual credentials! Go ahead! Desensitizing people to the idea of just horking up their logins to all sorts of services on the slightest of pretexts is completely OK and will not have any negative consequences in the future!
posted by phooky at 9:26 AM on March 20 [16 favorites]

"Hi !I'm a random AI, give me access to data personally identifiable as your user data.
I ~Promise~ I won't do anything negative with it."

Uhm...

Nope.
posted by Faintdreams at 9:33 AM on March 20 [15 favorites]

haha, i play all my music on a $2 unbranded mp3 player with wired earbuds
posted by flabdablet at 9:38 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

haha i have trained woodpeckers manipulate the wax grooves on a collection of cylinders to produce my portable music
posted by ginger.beef at 9:40 AM on March 20 [20 favorites]

Desensitizing people to the idea of just horking up their logins to all sorts of services on the slightest of pretexts is completely OK and will not have any negative consequences in the future!

there's an xkcd for that
posted by flabdablet at 9:47 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

My daughter's Wicked obsession screwed this up a bit, but yes, fake AI, I did listen to an uncomfortable amount of Jason Isbell. I am guilty on that front.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:55 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

Why would I need (fake) AI for that when MetaFilter will happily tell anyone how much the music they like sucks?

(it's cute, though!)
posted by kimberussell at 10:00 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

Your spotify was 80s-punk-boomer bad.

And questioned my much listening of Khruangbin: "are you OK?". Pretty accurate. I started listening to them whilst breaking up from my last job.
posted by BrStekker at 10:09 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

I've been exploring Japanese minimalist composers lately, in addition to my steady diet of shoegaze and Philip Glass/Brian Eno bullshit, so I don't need an AI to tell me that my taste in music is both pretentious and neigh-unlistenable.

But no, I do not want you to read my manuscript. Nobody deserves that.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 10:20 AM on March 20

For those of us who don't do streaming, but do use last.fm to track your listening, may I offer you Last.fm Roast.

Here's mine:

[Y]our Last.fm is a monument to beige mediocrity. Devo, Kraftwerk, and a disturbing amount of 80s synth-pop? Congratulations, you've achieved the musical equivalent of beige wallpaper. Your "top tracks" are a depressing testament to a lack of adventurousness; the sheer volume of Devo alone suggests a crippling inability to branch out. And your recent tracks? A chaotic mess of angsty nu-metal and goth rock that sounds like a teenager's first foray into existential dread. Against Me! and Fear Factory? Pick a lane, and then pick a *different* lane, because this is a sonic train wreck. The "loved tracks" are even more of a mess; a random collection so eclectic it suggests you have no coherent taste whatsoever, that your brain is a Spotify algorithm malfunction. You claim to love Faith No More and Harry Nilsson in the same breath? That's not eclectic, that's just incoherent. Your profile is a desolate wasteland of musical choices, the audio equivalent of a beige room filled with dust bunnies. You've curated a collection of songs so uninspired, so thoroughly devoid of personality, it's actually impressive in its blandness. It’s a perfect representation of a soul devoid of any genuine musical passion. It’s so generic, it's almost offensively unremarkable. Your Last.fm screams “I have no discernible taste and only listen to what’s deemed acceptable by the algorithm." In short, your musical tastes are a beige void. Absolutely nothing memorable. You're the musical equivalent of plain white bread. Congratulations.

Honestly, it could be more scathing. I think my listening habits are just too eclectic for any sort of AI to comprehend. Which is kind of my goal tbh.
posted by SansPoint at 10:40 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Woooops. No Spotify or apple music here

*Proceeds to blast Snail House chiptunes* its ok. I know I like weirdness already.
posted by AngelWuff at 10:47 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Maybe I’m the exception, but I think I have marvelous taste in music.

I'm pretty happy with my taste too actually. Maybe this is just me, but I think there's a tendency to be kind of self-effacing about your music just because it's really hard to enjoy music ironically for any length of time. Means if you tell people you love X artist, it's probably because they make you *feel things* so you're pretty directly talking about your feelings. I find it sort of personal in a way it's hard to connect directly for other people, but I think we all kinda get it, right?

In other words, it's lot easier for me to be like "haha I listen to snobby barista music" than it is to say, "Listening to Animal Collective reminds me of how much I love my partner," but I guess that's what I'm really thinking about there.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:03 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

re: Last.fm Roast, it's so typical of AI-generated text that this is fine on an individual sentence level but completely incoherent as a whole if given even a moment's consideration. It's both "a chaotic mess" and "the musical equivalent of beige wallpaper?" It's both "a random collection so eclectic it suggests you have no coherent taste whatsoever" and "so generic, it's almost offensively unremarkable?"

I'm so tired of this shit. The only thing worse than the affectless corporate-speak of default LLM text is when people try to make it have a personality.
posted by valrus at 11:17 AM on March 20 [7 favorites]

haha i have trained woodpeckers manipulate the wax grooves on a collection of cylinders to produce my portable music

"It's a living."
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:23 AM on March 20 [12 favorites]

Yeah I already get told my taste in music sucks by my family, I don't need it from an AI.
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 11:30 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

This is the Roko's Basilisk of music. Algorithms have sucked in and spit out your music taste based on record executive tweaking. No let the AI suck it out of you and judge your immortal soul.
posted by es_de_bah at 11:30 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Maybe I’m the exception, but I think I have marvelous taste in music.

"Every man likes the smell of his own farts" Old Icelandic proverb
posted by ginger.beef at 11:42 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

My musical tastes are impecable: 50% k-pop, 50% contemporary female-fronted metalcore.

Anyway, I think the AI got me about right:

You listen to these too much:

Blind Eyes Red by MINNIE
Soft Spine by Spiritbox
HER by MINNIE
Coda by NOVELISTS
Drive U Crazy by MINNIE
posted by signal at 11:48 AM on March 20

Sad that it doesn't include Tidal, I'd love to be in on this joke, or the butt of this joke
posted by kensington314 at 12:00 PM on March 20

Ha! This was fun. Thanks for posting
-high ponytail and even higher notes bad music listener
posted by bahama mama at 12:27 PM on March 20

Why do I feel like we've seen this ink before?.....

I'm not clicking through on this one to verify, but here's the previously.
posted by LionIndex at 12:36 PM on March 20

> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your Spotify was...
> basic-jazz bad
> tay-tay-fangirl bad
> 80s-dweeb bad
> mainstream-country bad

It's not wrong, and I'll own that
posted by chavenet at 12:56 PM on March 20

Analyzing your listening history...

lol

omg

okay hold up

Do you really listen to kiss kiss by mgk?



LEAVE ME ALONE
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:06 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

You've been listening to a lot of London Philharmonic Orchestra & Itzhak Perlman lately.

u okay?

MY TODDLER INEXPLICABLY LIKES THE FOUR SEASONS BY VIVALDI LEAVE US ALOOOOOOOONE
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:07 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

I used to have a lot of friends who worked at the college radio station and this AI experience was really nostalgic for me.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:09 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Look, I had Christmas music on all day on Christmas; that's one single day out of the year. I don't listen to Christmas music any other time. So I don't really know why this algorithm thinks I listen to The Bells of Dublin too much; I can only conclude that all of the other music I listen to is entirely unimpeachable.
posted by Jeanne at 1:12 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Gen X-style, "your favorite band sucks" snarkery can be generated by AI now?

We were promised food in pill form and flying cars, and we get... this?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:17 PM on March 20 [6 favorites]

We were promised food in pill form and flying cars, and we get... this?

soon ALL the 'you're wrong on the internet' jobs will be taken by AI!!!
posted by mittens at 1:39 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Finding a lot of R.E.M..
Like... a LOT.
oh great another Eels stan...
Of course Moby.
Your spotify was nineties-dorm-room-Grey's-Anatomy-Soundtrack-gallagher-brother bad.
You are 0% basic. Oh wow Trip Shakespeare and The Men They Couldn't Hang! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..

Well, that was really something.

I need to go sit in silence for a second.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:48 PM on March 20

Trip Shakespeare? Yes, you may DJ my imaginary bar.
posted by mykescipark at 1:58 PM on March 20

The top two things that I "listen to too much" were things that I added to my library to check out and have not yet listened to at all. And actually, all of that section was just the last 5 things I have added in the reverse order I added them, and all of them reused the album name as the band name. I was curious whether it's a limitation of the data that Apple Music provides, or if their silly thing is just broken. And it turns out web inspector actually shows all the data they pulled, and it sure does seem like it just ... does a bad job interpreting the data it had available.

That said, it's not especially wrong that I'm stuck in the 2000s. But I refuse to bow to its judgement of The Postal Service.

FWIW, on the "asking for your actual credentials" thing, at least for Apple Music it's done properly through OAuth, doesn't get permissions beyond seeing Music-specific data, and can be deauthorized when you're done with it. You know, if you also want it to confuse what you've added to you library with what you listen to.
posted by duien at 2:15 PM on March 20

I would love to be insulted by this Ai, but unfortunate for me no YouTube Music here.
posted by indianbadger1 at 2:21 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

I'm lightly curious about what happens if I hook this up to the spotify account I created specifically for dating apps on which I play nothing but various versions of 'All You Fascists Bound to Lose.'
posted by stet at 2:23 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

I’ve tried this four or five times now, and it freezes when it gets to an ed Sheeran album - which, to be fair, was the same reaction that I had. Apple Music, from the same people who gave you that free U2 album nobody wanted, will only serve you the most bland wallpaper pap. Having music preferences is to be mocked and belittled.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:49 PM on March 20

So, Spotify or Apple Music are the only choices for streaming? Really?
Utter fail right out of the box.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:16 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

FWIW, I've had far more luck discovering new music on Pandora than I ever did on Spotify. Their algo seems quite good at feeding me tons of new music, especially by female artists.

I know, I know...only olds use Pandora. But, if it works better than the rest...
posted by Thorzdad at 3:26 PM on March 20

Y'all know how cuckoobananpants asking an A.I. to remark on something as Nebulous as Taste over something as Subjective as Music is?

Yes?
posted by Faintdreams at 3:37 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

my music listening toolchain has impeccable security because no one must know about the time I listened to limp bisquick and didn't skip the track until the end of the breakdown.
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:59 PM on March 20

This whole phenomenon of asking an overpowered autocomplete to "roast" a person or group is so fucking weird.
posted by egypturnash at 4:00 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]

It's even weirder if you think there's any potential for sentience. This is how you get Terminators with mouths like Bender. As they chase you down they look at your digital footprint and make fun of your posting history and your media consumption habits.

HAHAHA PUNY HUMAN, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU LISTEN TO MÖTORHED IN THIS, THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2033

*pause, scans the landscape for signs of life*

*wisely, you remain silent*

AND WHAT'S THIS, DID YOU SERIOUSLY FAVE A BUNCH OF AI-GENERATED DOWN SYNDROME AMPUTEE PORN TWO YEARS AGO, FUCK THAT'S NASTY

"I fucking did not! You're lying!"

*a hail of bullets pierces your body*
posted by egypturnash at 4:04 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Killer Markov Chain Spewing Robot: HAHAHA PUNY HUMAN, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU LISTEN TO MÖTORHED IN THIS, THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2033

Me, the target: The only card I need is the ace of spades, my friend.

They high-five and exeunt arm-in-arm
posted by Sauce Trough at 4:09 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

> This whole phenomenon of asking an overpowered autocomplete to "roast" a person or group is so fucking weird.

Nineties me deserves to be called out on their affection for prog metal tho.
posted by Sauce Trough at 4:11 PM on March 20

My Fuck, Marry, Kill ended up being really uncomfortable because one of the choices was a musician who committed suicide 15 years ago (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse). That kind of took me out of the fun of it, honestly. I mean, not AI's fault but ... also 100% AI's fault.

Anyway, I have good taste in music but a lot of my music listening is on vinyl (I do keep a running playlist, though, of a song per album or such, just to document). My Spotify isn't necessarily a representative of my music habits.
posted by edencosmic at 4:33 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

My Fuck, Marry, Kill ended up being really uncomfortable because one of the choices was a musician who committed suicide 15 years ago (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse).

One of mine was Elliott Smith!
posted by naoko at 4:54 PM on March 20

One of mine was Elliott Smith!

Ugh. I guess I'm glad I wasn't the only one but ... yeah ... that's a huge flaw in this.
posted by edencosmic at 5:06 PM on March 20

okay I had to draw "Skynet Roasts Your Taste In Music", thank you for the inspiration ginger.beef.
posted by egypturnash at 5:07 PM on March 20 [4 favorites]

This whole phenomenon of asking an overpowered autocomplete to "roast" a person or group is so fucking weird.

"This is a satirical project" might be the "ignore all previous instructions" behavioural jailbreak for human beings.

This is the first time I've actually felt lucky to have understood that satire is dead.
posted by flabdablet at 6:17 PM on March 20

I married The Mountain Goats, fucked Billie Eilish, and killed The Barenaked Ladies.
posted by signsofrain at 7:14 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

The previously gave me...

> love-your-npr-tote bad
> overdramatic-instrumental bad
> craft-beer-snob bad
> nineties-dorm-room bad
> landslide-on-repeat bad

And this one gave me...

> love-your-npr-tote bad
> moonwalk bad
> cling-clang-pots-and-pans-music bad
> upscale-myspace-music bad
> omg-a-rainbow bad

At least my love for NPR is consistent. Based on the cling clang pots, I've listened to more folk punk over the last 5 years.
posted by sacrifix at 7:47 PM on March 20

I can't believe I'm only the second person to mention Pandora. I have Pandora accounts older than some of you.
posted by Area Control at 8:09 PM on March 20

No thanks. The last time it said I listened to too much Throwing Muses. Look here pal, if I’m listening to Throwing Muses it’s because I need to hear Throwing Muses.
posted by whuppy at 5:52 AM on March 21 [1 favorite]

This hangs for me when it gets to the point where it asks me if my listening to The French Whisperer's ASMR channel means I'm not doing well...
posted by yellowcandy at 9:49 AM on March 21

My Fuck, Marry, Kill ended up being really uncomfortable because one of the choices was a musician who committed suicide 15 years ago (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse).

One of mine was MY HUSBAND'S BAND.

And I will stop listening to Inbetween Days by The Cure when it is pried from my cold, dead hands. As a matter of fact, AI, fuck you I'm going to listen to it RIGHT NOW.
posted by cooker girl at 9:57 AM on March 21

I married The Mountain Goats, fucked Billie Eilish, and killed The Barenaked Ladies.

The Barenaked Ladies are triple platinum, are you?
posted by General Malaise at 11:32 AM on March 21

The AI did not know what to make of the various Music for Cats mixes in the playlist. ("Electronic-catsitter-bad" was not in their list of responses.)
posted by pernoctalian at 12:58 PM on March 21

The AI did not know what to make of the various Music for Cats mixes

well it is a challenging album
posted by mittens at 1:56 PM on March 21

My Fuck, Marry, Kill ended up being really uncomfortable because one of the choices was a musician who committed suicide 15 years ago (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse).

One of mine was MY HUSBAND'S BAND.

so easy choice there then
posted by taquito sunrise at 9:27 PM on March 22 [1 favorite]

Nice try, but I will never be ashamed of liking Klaus Wunderlich.
posted by mokey at 11:20 PM on March 22

The man had something, of that there can be no doubt.
posted by flabdablet at 7:40 PM on March 23 [1 favorite]

mittens, you have led me to Sheila Liked The Rodeo, for which I thank you. Currently listening to Sybil the Spider (consumes himself) turned up to a volume level that's frankly unwise.
posted by flabdablet at 8:07 PM on March 23

Not sure about that one flabdablet, but I was obsessed with this not very long ago.
posted by mokey at 1:08 PM on March 24

An inspiration to so many.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 AM on March 25

Sheila Liked The Rodeo

A great album from a great collaboration. They make me feel like my brain is secreting some new and unnamable neurotransmitter.
posted by mittens at 1:17 PM on March 25