In April of this year, Spotify released a blog post titled “Spotify Premium Users Can Now Turn Any Idea Into a Personalized Playlist With AI Playlist in Beta,” and within the past two weeks, US users have finally gained access to this new feature.
This isn’t Spotify’s first dip into AI, however, with the Spotify DJ and daylist both being successful features users have seen added to their apps. The AI DJ is a personalized guide that combines Spotify’s personalization technology, generative AI and a dynamic AI voice to provide users with an experience unique to them. The daylist is curated by analyzing your listening habits throughout the day and week, changing every few hours to try to best suit how you’re feeling.
AI Playlist combines Spotify’s powerful personalization technology with generative AI so users can turn their most creative ideas into playlists.
Spotify, 2024
This feature can be accessed by going to the “Your Library” tab and pressing the plus button in the upper right corner. After choosing AI Playlist, a chat box will come up, allowing you to tell the AI what kind of playlist you’re looking for.
While it can pretty accurately nail some prompts, others…not so much. For example, if you want to make a playlist based on a certain song, kind of like Apple Genius Playlists, you might not get the best results. For example, I asked the AI to give me songs similar to “One of Your Girls” by Troye Sivan and “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims. These are both more chill songs, and yet plenty of Charli xcx was included. It seems as though the AI is more focused on giving you a playlist of songs that you listen to frequently rather than actually completing the request.
Playlists based on songs aren’t the only area the AI struggles with. If you, for some reason, want a playlist with only one song, the AI isn’t going to be much help.
Even pretty basic and normal requests are too complex for the new feature.
Apparently even recreating Spotify-made playlists is a tough ask.
Depending on what you’re looking for, Spotify’s new addition to its AI tools may be just what you were looking for! If you feel like it’s not meeting your expectations, there are a couple of other AI playlist creators you could try. For one, here’s a trick to have ChatGPT not only choose the songs for a playlist but also literally create it for you.
If you’re not opposed to a paid option, Playlistable is another AI that will import its playlists directly to Spotify, and it seems to have a lot more nuance to it than some other options out there. If you somehow still have an iPhone with an update pre-iOS 10, you can also use Apple’s Genius Playlist feature, or you could use the Music app on your Mac. Or of course, you can go the old-fashioned route of spending hours curating the perfect playlist to fit that really specific mood you get into right before getting into the shower.