Over the past four years, Spotify has been experimenting to make its world-leading music streaming service more appealing to subscribers. That led it to create the ‘daylist’, along with other AI-powered playlist overhauls designed to level up users’ experiences. After a trial period in the US, ‘daylists’ are now being launched worldwide, and its other AI playlists are sure to follow.
Your day in a playlist is now available to even more listeners around the 🌎 What’s yours right now? pic.twitter.com/aceouAytg6
— Spotify News (@SpotifyNews) September 6, 2024
Spotify’s Streaming Upgrade
Spotify needs no introduction as the world’s largest and most popular music streaming service. It may be the biggest name in music, but it has spent the last few years adding new features and even new content, like exclusive podcasts and audiobooks. As part of that effort, it’s using the latest AI tech to change how the platform creates, manages and recommends playlists.
This new approach seems to have paid off for the music streamer, which has since posted record profits. It’s a standout success in streaming, while other services like movie and TV streamers battle in one of the most competitive markets in media. More broadly, other online companies have embraced the streaming business model to offer videos, digital books, and even casino games. For example, sites like Paddy’s online casino stream game shows and other games such as blackjack or roulette, all played with an interactive audience. For market leaders, it’s a quick, convenient way to distribute content online. In Spotify’s case, it is only now reaping those benefits after expanding and overhauling its world-renowned platform.
‘Daylists’ Explained
In September of 2023, Spotify unveiled its new ‘daylist’ feature. Presented as “your day in a playlist”, these are auto-generated playlists with a twist. They track your listening habits and then generate a playlist to reflect how you feel throughout the day, to match what you should be feeling. The result is a dynamic set of playlists that change throughout the day, and frequently update to keep up with your mood. This means the playlist will be replaced with another, but you can save favourite ‘daylists’ to your library to make sure you don’t lose them.
When introduced, the feature was restricted to users in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Now, roughly a year later, ‘daylists’ are available for 180 markets and support more than just English, with 14 new languages joining the party. As part of the new expansion, Spotify mentions working with “local music and culture experts” because languages have different ways of describing subjective vibes and moods. This is even the case with universal things like love, as covered by the LA Times. This meant the rollout wasn’t as simple as exporting English ‘daylists’ to other countries, which is likely why it took a whole year to reach other parts of the world.
Spotify’s Other Playlist Tools
The ‘daylist’ was just one of Spotify’s secret weapons to fight its way to profitability. It first experimented with the AI DJ way back in February 2023, which used relatively new generative AI tech to better recommend your next tune. Functioning similarly to a randomised playlist, an AI model listens to your songs behind the scenes and tries to predict what songs you’ll like before you even know it. Unlike ‘daylists’, this is only available for Spotify premium subscribers.
More impressive is its latest addition – the AI Playlist. This is a perfected implementation of AI that allows users to generate playlists using prompts. It essentially turns your Spotify account into a chatbot, where you can describe vague ideas, imagery and moods, and the AI will find songs that fit the bill. Then you can talk back to the AI, encouraging or correcting it, so it knows exactly what you’re after in the future. This feature debuted in the UK and Australia and, as of late 2024, hasn’t been expanded to other markets.
There’s no doubt that other AI tools like ‘daylists’ are on the way. That includes the full rollout of AI Playlists, if they prove to be successful. Given the freedom AI Playlists offer to users, it’s highly likely that future Spotify subscribers will be able to summon tunes just by typing out their feelings.
