Spotify’s AI playlist-making function, once only available in the U.K and Australia, has finally made its way to the United States.
The feature, rolled out earlier this week in beta, allows Spotify Premium users to prompt a chatbot with whatever genre, emotion, or life event they want their music to represent. Spotify’s AI will in turn spew out a playlist, made up of tunes tht reflect both the prompt and user’s listening history.
Molly Holder, Spotify senior product director of personalization, told Fast Company via email that the streamer sees playlists as a “hotbed of discovery,” and the AI-generated ones can help users better personalize the process of discovering new music—if they give it the best prompts.
In other words, users have to know what they’re looking for, which will help them use the tool effectively. Here are the best ways to use Spotify’s AI playlist function to maximize your enjoyment, based on 24 hours of experimenting and suggestions from Holder.
Specificity is key—to a point
For optimal playlists, prompts should be specific to what the user is feeling. Some prompts that steered thoughtful collections included: “I’m sick, make me a playlist” yielded “Soothing Uplifts,” prompting “Make a playlist I shouldn’t share with my mom” led to “Rebellious Vibes,” and “Make me a playlist for falling in love” produced “Love’s Melodic Whispers.” The chatbot even successfully crafted a playlist based on the fall chill in the air, pulling together “Boston Weather Vibes” with a hefty supply of mellow Lord Huron songs.
“The more specific you can be, the better,” Holder said. “The most successful playlists are generated through ‘genre,’ ‘mood,’ or ‘artist’ prompts, but animals, activities, movie characters, colors—even emojis—are all fair game, too.”
Where the bot is less successful, then, is responding to vague prompts. After asking for a playlist of “new songs I should be listening to,” the bot spurted out some generic pop: Nick Jonas, Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj. When asked to produce a playlist based on my previous prompts, the bot produced a “Sonic Tapestry” playlist that wasn’t a tapestry at all, but a homogenous grouping of indie pop.
