Spotify launches AI playlist creation to meet your specific music needs

AI is being infused into so many different services and software features we use every day. Now, it’s impacting the music we listen to as well. Today Spotify announced that it’s rolling out AI playlist generation—formerly in a limited test—to several new countries, including the US. Here’s how it works.

Spotify + AI solves a big music discovery problem

One of the modern challenges in media is that there’s so much content available, but not enough good curation tools to find it all.

Apple Music, for example, has a team of human editors who build curated playlists. But that can only go so far to meet a diverse set of users’ needs.

AI playlist creation looks like a great new avenue for discovering music for any and every occasion.

From Spotify Newsroom:

Creating a playlist with AI Playlist is as easy as entering a unique prompt into the chat, like “upbeat pop music for my European summer vacation” or “a romantic playlist for date night at home.” Spotify will then offer a personalized selection of songs that match the vibe you’re going for, which you can revise and refine by typing in additional prompts.

The more specific you can be, the better. The most successful playlists are generated with prompts that contain a mix of genres, moods, artists, or decades, so get creative! You can also reference places, animals, activities, movie characters, colors, and even emojis.

AI playlist generation is currently limited to Premium subscribers on iOS and Android devices. We’ll see if Spotify ends up including free users later on.

I haven’t tried the feature out yet, but it sounds very promising. It’s launching in beta, so I expect the results at first may not be all that great. But over time there’s a lot of potential here.

Perfect use for Apple Intelligence inside Apple Music

Apple has done a lot of work creating playlists and stations to meet various moods and situations. But it’s hard to beat the power of letting a user type their own ideal playlist description.

I love how Spotify even encourages being as specific as possible. One of the issues I’ve encountered with Apple’s own ‘Made for You’ playlists, and its curated editorial playlists, is that they’re often not quite what I’m looking for.

But if I can type a request and have Apple Intelligence make a playlist for me—which can then be further refined with more input—that sounds like a killer feature for Apple Music.

Are you excited about AI playlist generation? How has the feature worked for you? Let us know in the comments.