Spotify’s AI Playlists Are Now Available in the US and Canada
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Amidst all the cool new Apple Intelligence features that will (eventually) come to Apple’s latest devices, we were a bit surprised when the company had nothing AI-related to announce for the Apple Music experience.
It might be because Apple prefers to focus on human-curated playlists from its Apple Music editorial team. Still, even before Apple outlined its AI plans at June’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), its most prominent music streaming rival was already beginning to roll out its own AI-powered music features.
To be clear, Apple may still have a few tricks up its sleeve that it has yet to announce. Code found in the iOS 18 betas in July pointed to AI-generated playlist artwork. However, if this appears at all, it’s expected to be little more than a button to invoke the Image Playground generative AI feature, which is coming later this year.
Meanwhile, Spotify has made good on its promise to roll out AI Playlists. They opened up in beta in Australia and the UK in April, and today, the streamer is rolling them out to four more countries: the US, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Music discovery remains one of Spotify’s key selling points, with many iPhone owners sticking with the service for that reason alone, despite weak integration with the Apple ecosystem and comparatively poor support for artists. AI Playlists promise to take that up a notch, letting users create mixes for nearly any occasion.
Creating a playlist with AI Playlist is as easy as entering a unique prompt into the chat, like “upbeat pop music for my European summer vacation” or “a romantic playlist for date night at home.” Spotify will then offer a personalized selection of songs that match the vibe you’re going for, which you can revise and refine by typing in additional prompts.Spotify
While some reports suggested AI Playlists might be part of a higher-tier Spotify subscription, it’s available to all Premium subscribers in the current beta as long as they’re in one of the six supported countries.
Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on Spotify’s ”Deluxe” tier, which will provide lossless listening for a higher price. It’s a rather bold and somewhat cheeky move to charge more for lossless quality three years after Apple began offering it at the same price as its standard plans (and Amazon quickly followed suit), which is presumably why Spotify plans to sweeten the pot with other features like advanced library management and headphone optimization. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told The Verge in July that there will be “some other things that I’m not ready to talk about just yet.”
There’s a good chance that AI Playlists may eventually move to this Deluxe tier in some way once they come out of beta and that pricier plan is announced. Spotify could restrict them entirely to Deluxe subscribers or simply limit the number of AI Playlists that could be created on lower plans, similar to how other generative AI services like ChatGPT are priced.
Apple Music prides itself on its human-curated playlists, and the team has done a lot of good work building playlists and stations for nearly every mood and situation. Still, there are inevitably some edge cases they haven’t thought of, and it’s hard to argue that letting Apple Intelligence build a custom playlist would be a bad thing. It certainly seems like it would have broader and more practical appeal than creating custom emojis of dinosaurs riding skateboards.