Just as users grapple with whether AI personalization feels truly personal or merely programmatic, Spotify is throwing its hat further into the ring. The streaming giant is expanding its AI Playlist beta globally, a move landing just one day after rival YouTube unveiled a strikingly similar feature, escalating the AI arms race in music discovery.
Prompting the machine: Spotify's AI Playlist feature, first introduced in beta around April 2024, allows users to generate playlists by typing natural language prompts directly into the app. According to Spotify's support documentation, users can request mixes based on genres, moods, artists, decades, or more creative ideas referencing activities, places, characters, or even emojis. The platform utilizes large language models combined with a listener's history to generate the tracklist, which users can then refine with further instructions like "more upbeat" or remove unwanted songs before saving.
Global rollout, beta constraints: After an initial limited rollout and a smaller expansion last September, Spotify announced, that the AI Playlist beta is now available to Premium subscribers in over 40 additional markets across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. Countries reportedly included in the expansion range from Australia and Singapore to South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya, according to outlets like V.O.I and TechLabari. However, the feature remains firmly in beta, is currently limited to the mobile app, and only functions with English language prompts, potentially limiting its immediate utility for many users in newly added non-Anglophone regions.
Playing catch-up or setting pace?: The timing of Spotify's broad expansion is notable, coming just a day after YouTube Music announced its own prompt-based playlist generator dubbed "Ask Music". This near-simultaneous rollout underscores the intensifying competition among streaming services to leverage generative AI.
The 'personal' touch via AI: While the promise is effortless, personalized curation, the reality of AI-generated playlists is still evolving. An early comparative review from AndroidPolice described Spotify's AI Playlist results as "impressively average," noting that while functional, it sometimes included irrelevant tracks requiring manual removal. The reviewer still found Spotify's tool superior to YouTube Music's initial offering but highlighted that achieving genuinely personal results that perfectly match a user's nuanced taste remains a challenge for the current technology, even with refinement options.