How does YouTube’s “AI Playlist” compare to Spotify’s “Prompted Playlist”?
Plenty of DSPs are hopping on the AI playlist train, but how does YouTube’s recent offering compare to Spotify’s?
Last week, Google announced that it would be joining the likes of Spotify, Deezer, and Amazon Music by introducing a new “AI Playlist” feature. Available for YouTube Premium subscribers, the feature lets users generate playlists by entering a text or speech prompt, much like Spotify’s recent “Prompted Playlist“.
Since the YouTube’s “AI Playlist” is very new, there isn’t a lot of information out there about how it works yet. It is clear that it shares plenty of similarities with “Prompted Playlist”, where users can input prompts that describe the type of music they want to listen to. Alternatively, suggested prompts can be used to create playlists, if you’re stuck for ideas. Both features appear to utilise the user’s listening history to generate playlists, with familiar songs and artists plus some fresh ideas thrown into the mix.
Android Police has tested YouTube’s “AI Playlist”, directly comparing it to Spotify’s “Prompted Playlist”, shedding light on just how effective the prompts are, and evaluating the feature’s music discovery ability. Testing both specific and broad prompts, Anroid Police found that the feature was decent at understanding prompts, and offered an even split of familiar songs and new-to-the-user songs.
However, when prompting the AI specifically for music discovery, it did not perform as well. “Unfortunately, using a “Music that’s new to me” prompt was not very impressive. It added just three songs to the playlist, and while they were indeed new to me, it’d be all done in less than 10 minutes.” When asks to generate a playlist made up of songs by artists that the users liked but hadn’t heard before, “it couldn’t generate a playlist at all.”
Based on these findings, it appears that being more general or broad, sticking to genres and moods or decades yields the best results.
There is no limit to the number of AI playlists you can create, according to Android Police, and you aren’t forced to save playlists to your library in order to listen to them.
The consensus appears to be that Spotify’s “Prompted Playlist” feature has the edge at the moment. YouTube’s “AI Playlist” doesn’t display the prompt you used to create the playlist once you’ve saved it. Spotify allows users to edit the prompt at any time in order to tweak the results, and lets users choose how often the playlist refreshes. On top of that, there is no option to remove single tracks from a playlist with AI Playlist, and the feature sometimes adds random songs into the mix.
Spotify has stated that “Prompted Playlist” is still in beta, and that users can expect updates and developments in the future.
As this is an early iteration, we can presume that YouTube’s AI-generated playlisting feature will be subject to refinement down the line. Any teething problems or omissions may be remedied, making it an ever stronger competitor to Spotify and other DSPs with similar features.