We tried Spotify’s new AI playlist tool but got songs about wet farts
Not quite what we were after.
Ever wondered which songs a robot would pick if you told it your deepest desires?
No need to wonder anymore, because Spotify now has an AI to curate playlists for you using any detailed prompt you can dream up.
Compared to someone sitting taping the radio, it may be somewhat less romantic to have a corporation’s robot make your mixtape. But you can’t deny it’s more efficient.
The beta feature was announced this weekend, and is available for Premium users in the UK and Australia using Android or iOS devices.
It is a step up from the personalised playlists and Spotify DJ already available on the streaming app, such as ‘Discover Weekly’ which was introduced almost ten years ago, in 2015.
What is Spotify’s AI Playlist?
The new feature lets you type in an entire prompt which can be very specific, such as ‘an indie folk playlist to give my brain a big warm hug’ or ‘sad music for painting dying flowers’ (both suggestions from Spotify themselves).
It actually sounded quite exciting to me, because until now Spotify kept recommending the same old favourites, which made my listening feel in a bit of a rut.
Also, despite asking for nursery rhymes to be excluded from my taste profile, I was still getting recommendations for songs like the Hokey Cokey (side note: surely it is time to introduce user profiles, Spotify? Even just a ‘kids’ profile would do.)
So, I updated my app to get access to the new feature.
How to use it and where is it available?
You can find it by going to Your Library, pressing the plus sign at the top right, and then clicking the new ‘AI Playlist’ option which promises to ‘turn your ideas into playlists using AI’.
‘What do you want to hear today?’ it asks. ‘Let’s make a playlist together.’
In case you feel overwhelmed by the options and your brain freezes, there are prompts such as ‘Make a dinner party playlist of chill instrumental funk and jazz’.
These prompts are presumably also AI generated, so I was kind of flattered that the robot thinks I’m a woman of such sophistication. Until it also suggested I might like Nineties songs or to ‘revisit the past’, at which point I realised it just thinks I am old.
I had my own ideas, though.
‘Music with animal noises, but not nursery rhymes’
My toddler loves animal noises, and I’m trying to get him more interested in music. So I asked Spotify for ‘music with animal noises, but not nursery rhymes’. I thought maybe there were some cool pop songs incorporating a dog barking, or maybe an elephant’s trumpet?
Nope. The playlist generated, despite having the promising title of ‘Wild Beats’, did not have any catchy tunes along the lines of Blackbird by the Beatles, with birdsong at the end.
Instead, the first song was ‘Baby Giggling’ from a sound effects library (not really a song, then), followed by ‘Wet fart sounds’. And then a second option of ‘Fart Sounds: Over 1000 Farts’ a few tracks down.
While my son would no doubt have found this amusing, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Try harder, robot!
‘Rock songs incorporating classic music’
After this, I went for a simpler prompt that I thought it could manage easily: ‘Rock songs incorporating classic music.’
The AI responded that it was ‘having a bit of trouble’ and needed to widen its approach. But it did spit back out a playlist called ‘Diverse Rock Meets Classical’, which came back with several songs I had heard hundreds of times but never registered the classical element, including Numb by Muse, which includes piano.
Other songs didn’t seem to have much classical music, though. The playlist was also an odd mix of blockbuster singalongs and obscure tracks.
My experience so far was like trying to talk to ChatGPT. Fascinating and potentially useful, but still not at a level you could trust for more than a starting point.
It is still in beta, so that’s understandable. I gave it another try.
‘Songs to watch a solar eclipse and contemplate the meaning of life’
I asked for existential songs about the total eclipse of the Sun, given that lots of people were in that mindset yesterday.
This time, Spotify delivered and came up with a solid list of eclipse-appropriate songs including ‘Black Hole Sun’ and ‘Moonshadow’.
Maybe that was too easy though, as hundreds of people must have come up with a playlists for their eclipse parties already so the AI could just have copied them.
Digging deep, I asked for a….
Country and funk playlist if I was a red squirrel searching for where I hid my nuts in the ground, with songs from between the years 2003 and 2014
Without a blink, the AI delivered a playlist called ‘Squirrel’s Groove’ which was pretty good, except some of the songs were older than I’d asked for and just remastered more recently.
Unfortunately, I went into a meeting before saving it and lost the playlist. When I tried to recreate it, I got something completely different including Superstition by Stevie Wonder and Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood. Can’t quite see how these relate to a forgetful squirrel, but maybe the AI knows more about squirrel psychology than I do?
All in all, it’s a fun way of finding some new music.
But for creatives who love making the perfectly pitched playlist… I’d say there’s at least a couple of years before AI makes the craft obsolete.