This AI Judges Your Spotify and Tells You How Basic You Really Are

Isaac Taylor

Ever wanted to know how basic your listening habits really are? Well, fortunately for you, we’ve set the most powerful AI algorithms in the world on to finding the answer to that very question.

“How Bad Is Your Spotify” is a project developed by The Pudding. It analyses your Spotify account and gives you an extremely judgemental rundown of your listening habits. It’s pretty much that one hipster friend who has vinyls and inscrutable taste in music tutting over how much everything you love and adore sucks.

Anyway, you can get started below!

Otherwise check out the main site here.

It told me I was 8% basic. Another friend of mine achieved 25% but blamed it on his toddler listening to Crazy Frog over and over again. Personally I don’t believe a toddler has much control over how basic they are, that’s all on the parent.

The entire project is tongue-in-cheek insufferability and represents everything wrong with music elitism. When asking the AI how it knows what’s “good”, it tells you it’s “been trained on a corpus of over two million indicators of objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations, and subreddits you’ve never heard of.”

It’s terrible and I love it. At the end of the day, the only good music is the music you love listening to. Being embarrassed about listening to the latest manufactured pop hit instead of Kraftwerk cutlery clattering is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s designed to be loved. It’s the Big Mac of music and you know what, I love Big Macs. I’m the bad guy, duh.