For many years, Spotify's music suggestions operated almost completely automatically. Every time users listened, skipped, or saved a song, the application silently collected data to build familiar playlists such as Discover Weekly or Release Radar.
These lists often appear in advance, creating the feeling that Spotify will guess the idea and know in advance what users want to listen to next.
With a new feature called Prompted Playlist, Spotify is changing that approach, towards a more interactive and purposeful experience.
This feature is currently deployed for users in the US and Canada, allowing the creation of playlists to become more flexible and deeply personalized.
Instead of just relying on automatic algorithms or personally selecting each song, users only need to enter a written request describing what they want to hear.
These may be simple suggestions like "music to learn", "muscle exercise", or more visually appealing like "music for a rainy afternoon" or "specific cultural atmosphere". Based on this reminder, Spotify will combine it with music listening history to create a suitable playlist.
According to Spotify, Prompted Playlist is designed as a collaboration between humans and algorithms.
Users set rules in their own words, while Spotify is responsible for processing data, trends and personal preferences to turn that request into a complete playlist.
This approach helps listeners not only receive music, but also proactively orient the process of exploring music.
A noteworthy point is that Prompted Playlist exploits deeper data than many other playlists. Instead of just relying on what users have listened to recently, this feature can use the entire history of listening to music, including preferences from many years ago.
This helps the proposals to be more diverse, not confined to temporary trends.
In addition, the playlist created can continue to be updated daily or weekly, adding new songs when they are released. This way helps avoid repeating familiar songs, a point that is often boring for long-time listeners.
Prompted Playlist is also different from the AI Playlist feature that Spotify introduced. While AI Playlist focuses on quickly creating playlists from a single request, Prompted Playlist is built to evolve over time.
During the creation process, Spotify displays short notes, indicating which mood, cultural influence, or sound style the system is interpreting the request in.
Once completed, the playlist starts operating like any other playlist on Spotify. Users can remove the track, rearrange the order or save the list, thereby continuing to fine-tune the suggestions in the future.
With Prompted Playlist, Spotify is adjusting the balance between powerful algorithms and direct feedback from users.
Instead of automatically guessing users' opinions, this platform shows an effort to listen more clearly than what listeners really want.
