Adventures Spotify's AI Playlists

I've not been shy about how I feel about generative AI, especially for coding or writing. Much if it is too error prone to be useful on its own while the errors can be hard to find and fix. I'm also not keen on the copyright issues. My own book was ingested and used by Anthropic without my permission, possibly creating a non-permitted, derivative work. 

Creating a playlist, on the other hand, seems like the perfect AI application. There's no truly wrong song to have in a playlist, even if my own choices would be different. Artists whose songs are part of the playlist will get paid when I listen to their songs in the generated playlist. And yet...

Most generated playlists, at least in Spotify, tend to have the same songs recycled over and over. There's rarely the "Wow" factor that comes with an unexpected choice. Redundancy and a lack of surprise make for a mediocre playlist. It lacks soul. Spotify has used AI to generate static playlists, likely from internally generated and QA tested prompts. They tend to be blandly efficient and based on whatever I'm listening to at the moment. Just listened to Metallica? Now, my AI generated "daylist" will a be heavy metal focused. Old school punk and New Wave? I get more old school punk and new wave. As Dom DeLuise said in History of the World Part 1, "Nice. Not thrilling but nice." 

Still, I was very interested to try out the new Spotify prompted AI playlist feature. The idea is to start off with a prompt that could generate a playlist such as Unexpected Genre Adventure or Vinyl Nights in Tokyo. By using your own listening data as a part of the prompt, you should, in theory, get something personalized yet fitting within the framework of the prompt. More interesting, though, is that you can customize the prompt to make it slightly different and more interesting. 

I started with the prompt that was titled My Life as A Movie.  The prompt was:

Make me a playlist for when I’ve got main character syndrome. The world’s spinning, the lighting’s perfect, and every step feels like a movie scene. I want songs that make ordinary moments feel epic: walking, staring out windows, overthinking, winning, losing, all of it. For every song, tell me what scene we’re in right now—what’s happening, what it looks like, what I’m feeling. Build it like the soundtrack to my life, focusing on songs I would like based on my listening history. Do not repeat artists.

That's pretty cool. Your own personal movie soundtrack. I decide to make one small change by adding "90s romcom" to the first sentence. This was meant to be a constraint. The playlist shouldn't have music from after the 1990s or else it wouldn't make any sense. In addition, they had to be songs typically found in Rom Com of the era. Granted this made things both easier - narrowing the domain of songs - and more difficult - discerning what should be in a 90s Rom Com.

I hit generate and encountered the first problem. It took forrreeeevvvvver. As in hours with no playlist. What was it generating? A literal lifetime of music? Clearly, I needed to add a constraint on the number of songs. Second time around I added " Keep playlist to 100 songs." to the end of the prompt and very quickly had a playlist of songs that pretty much fit the bill. Mostly. Sort of. Kinda.

See, it didn't quite get the 90s part of "90s Rom Com". So, while Mr. Brightside by The Killers fit the playlist well, it's clearly post-1990s and hence doesn't really fit the prompt. Also, songs were scattered across at least three decades. It should have been a tighter range. Soundtracks for most movies either contain period proper songs, in this case the 90s, or pick a time period that the exemplified the main vibe of the movie. For example, the Rom Com "When Harry Met Sally" uses jazz standards, performed by the amazing Harry Connick Jr., to place the movie outside of any particular time. "Say Anything", on the other hand, uses all contemporary songs. The most iconic scene in the movie only works because the main character is using a time appropriate and theme appropriate song Peter Gabriels "In Your Eyes." The Spotify generated playlist, by contrast, is all over the place, from staples of 70s Classic Rock to 90s Alternative to early 2000s Garage Revival. 

That's not to say that the playlist isn't good. It's quite good, in fact. And there are surprises which make it actually interesting to listen to. A segue from 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins to Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd was completely unexpected and yet, it worked both musically and for mood. 

A fun feature is the notes that accompany each song. They describe the "scene" in the movie. I especially liked the minutia of notes such as "Kitchen scene: parent's voicemail advice plays while burn grilled cheese and life feels clearer." That's so ridiculously specific and no average human would think of it that way. 

So, what's the final verdict? Spotify's prompted AI playlist really works - mostly, sort of, kinda. It can create a viable playlist. Songs dovetail well with no major shifts in tempo or weird transitions. The notes on the songs are delightful, especially when they begin with "Hungover grocery aisle chaos". That's just fun.

Unfortunately, the AI engine doesn't ask for clarity for the prompt such as "Do you only want songs from the 90s?" or "Is there a genre you want to focus on or exclude?" which seem like something it should do. It's inability to balance the length of time it takes to generate a playlist with the number of songs is also puzzling. Anyone using this service needs to think to put a limit on the number of songs in the prompt or watch it take hours to create something a human could do in a few minutes.

I'll give it a B+. With a few refinements, it could get a grade of A.