Back in December, Spotify launched one of its most powerful playlist creators yet: Prompted Playlists. it was initially made available in beta to Premium members in New Zealand, and following a successful trial run, it’s finally expanding to the US and Canada.
Building on Spotify’s AI playlist tool, which launched in April 2024, Prompted Playlists takes a similar approach but gives you full control over where you steer the algorithm. In its news blog, Spotify puts it quite simply: “You’re not just asking for music, you’re shaping how Spotify goes about discovering it for you.”
Using prompts, big or small, you can tell it exactly what you want to hear and it will generate a unique playlist – but there are a few twists.
The most notable difference with Prompted Playlists is that, just like Discover Weekly, it updates every so often, and you get to decide when it does. In addition to fresh music recommendations, Prompted Playlists also offers context behind each song with a new Notes function – another selling point for the new tool.
Though Spotify has plans to roll Prompted Playlists out to more markets, it’s starting with the US and Canada for the first stage of expansion. I’ve been experimenting with Prompted Playlists for a few days, and while I’m enjoying what it has to offer, it’s still in its infancy with a lot of room for growth – but I see that as a good thing.
Recreate Discover Weekly, but make it better
Going into Prompted Playlists, my idea was to create a new way to discover new songs, artists, and genres. I use features like Discover Weekly and Spotify’s own All New All Now playlist, so I wanted something more tailored.
For starters, each Prompted Playlist takes around two minutes to generate, which is a bit of a wait, but expected for a feature in its early days. That’s the first area for future improvement. Then it was time to really dive in, and I kicked things off with the following prompt:
‘Add songs that have been released in the last week from artists I’ve been enjoying recently. It should be similar to the All New All Now playlist, with new tracks from recommended artists.’
For a first go, it was quite satisfactory, with a handful of fresh bangers from the past week, albeit a little shorter than my usual playlists (each Prompted Playlist lasts around 60-90 minutes). But it took some tinkering to get it where I exactly wanted it to be.
One of the faults I couldn’t shake was the range of artists the playlist recommended, Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen being two of them. I know that I’ve never streamed those two artists, nor do I listen to artists of a similar type, so the playlist had no reason to recommend them. After removing them from my Spotify ecosystem, I updated the playlist to see what else it would give me, but ran into a prompt error (see below).
Though you can be hyper-detailed and specific with your prompt, you need to give it a time span that’s wide enough for it to gather recommendations from. When I updated it with a more nuanced prompt, things started looking brighter:
‘Add songs that have been released in the last two weeks from artists that I enjoy as well as ones you’d think I’d like. It should span genres similar to the All New All Now playlist, with new releases from recommended artists based on my recent listening habits for added music discovery’.
After some refining, the final playlist turned out to be just what I was after: a collection of fresh music releases from an even blend of familiar and new artists, which I’ve since included in my weekly music streaming regimen. Now, every Friday I get to wake up to an updated playlist of new music drops tailored to my requests – but I’m not leaving All New All Now and Discover Weekly behind.
A few minor issues, but a solid starting point
Not every new feature has a perfect landing, including Prompted Playlists. In spite of the tool’s clever functions, there’s still room for improvement, and Spotify should start with speeding up the time it takes to put a Prompted Playlist together. Another small tweak that would make Prompted Playlists unstoppable is increasing the amount of songs it suggests – I reckon a roughly three-hour playlist is reasonable, similar to Daylists.
There’s also the matter of recommending artists that don’t match my listening habits which Spotify could also work on, however this can also be tackled by entering hyper-specific prompts so that Spotify understands exactly what it is you want to hear.
Unlike other Spotify features that I’ve used and immediately abandoned, the Prompted Playlists tool has made a fair impression on me, giving me a new means of fresh music discovery, but one that caters to my personal taste profile . With some tweaks here and there, I can see it becoming quite the hotspot in my Spotify ecosystem.
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rowan.davies@futurenet.com (Rowan Davies)
