A Spotify Beta Feature Lets Users Make Custom Playlists by Writing AI Prompts

If a weird, throwaway, AI-generated playlist is something that interests you, you probably already know that you can just type your request into the chatbot of your choice, and transfer the result into something like Spotify or Apple Music manually. But now, Spotify is rolling out its own, possibly less clunky version of this process, and calling the feature Prompted Playlist, currently available only to premium Spotify users in New Zealand.

Since it’s a beta feature, Spotify says “the experience will evolve as we scale to more listeners.” 

According to a Spotify blog post, the feature “taps into your entire Spotify listening history, all the way back to day one.” Spotify offers an example that would give you a diverse but familiar playlist, “music from my top artists from the last five years,” followed by a twist aimed at refining that prompt: “feature deep cuts I haven’t heard yet.”

Spotify also says a prompted playlist can be set to “refresh daily or weekly,” which would make it, practically speaking, a bit like the “Discover Weekly” or “Release Radar,” options that already exist. It also notes that there are pre-written prompts for people who are intrigued enough to tap their way to this feature, but don’t have any actual ideas yet.

Spotify claims that “Prompted Playlists let you describe exactly what you want to hear and set the rules for your personalized playlist.” If you have any experience with the Spotify algorithm before an LLM was bolted onto it, you’re probably instinctively a little wary of this. Spotify, like so much of the algorithm-driven tech world, doesn’t actually know you, whatever it may say. It always seems like any uncannily perceptive recommendation is followed closely by six Ed Sheeran recommendations.

But I’m not in New Zealand, and can’t try and make Spotify’s Prompted Playlist feature work for me, nor can I make it do dumb shit. So for now I’ll just have to use a chatbot: