Spotify generates revenue through advertising and its premium subscription tier. Of these two income streams, it generates more money through Spotify Premium subscriptions than advertising. In 2024, Spotify earned approximately €13.82 bn from subscriptions compared to €1.85 bn from advertising. While the vast library of unlimited music fuelled Spotify’s early growth, the company put more emphasis on discovering new music year after year to keep growing. Competitors like Amazon Music and YouTube Music offer similar libraries of music, so Spotify has tried to distinguish itself through stellar discovery tools.
Starting with Discover Weekly in 2025, Spotify has steadily released more and more tools to help its users discover new music. Most of these were driven by Spotify’s algorithms, but since AI exploded onto the scene, it was only a matter of time before Spotify embraced the technology. Spotify launched AI Playlist in September 2024, and since then, the tool has spread around the world and been copied by other companies. I’ve tested this feature since it launched in my country in April 2024, and it’s helped me create playlists I regularly listen to, with some caveats.
AI Playlist is a reliable backup for my regular playlists
I can always rely on them to generate interesting tracks
I should make this clear before I dive into what I like about Spotify’s AI Playlist feature: AI Playlists do not, and I doubt ever will, replace manual playlist creation for me. For years, I’ve crafted playlists through careful curation aided by suggestions from Spotify. These playlists have stuck with me for years, some for nearly a decade. But creating these playlists takes time, and sometimes I’m just not feeling like listening to any of them, which is when I turn to Spotify’s AI Playlist feature.
You can start listening to an AI playlist within seconds of entering a prompt. For example, one of my favourite genres of music is rock music with a dance beat. So I entered exactly that into AI Playlist.
I can instantly see that this is a playlist that I would enjoy listening to. It’s comprised mostly of songs I already love, plus a sprinkling of tracks I don’t recognise. I’m listening to it as I type these words, and all I can think now is, where has Apollo 440 been all my life?
When I need to put on a playlist, and none of mine fit the vibe, AI Playlist is there to help. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg for discovery.
AI Playlist helps me dive deeper into my favorite genres
Think you’ve mined a subgenre dry? Think again
The above example is how I used AI Playlist when it first came out. While I still use it to create playlists now and again, I’m now using it to discover new tracks rather than generate whole playlists.
Let’s take the above example. It’s a great playlist, but it’s a fairly random selection of songs from various decades. I’m mostly interested in rock dance music from the ’60s and ’70s, so let’s ask AI Playlist to refine the playlist according to the parameters.
Much better, with one caveat. Most of these tracks are songs that are already in my library. Here’s where the AI starts to show its limitations. Ideally, I’d want it to create a playlist of songs I haven’t saved in my library, but the AI doesn’t seem to be able to parse this request. It thinks that the same song on two different albums are entirely different tracks, so it just recreates the playlist with different albums but the same songs.
However, it doesn’t take that much work to discover new tracks with AI Playlist. After a few rounds of removing songs I know, pinning songs I don’t, then entering the prompt “Add songs I don’t know,” I end up with a playlist of mostly new songs. Sure, it takes a little work, but it’s far better for discovery than the Discover Weekly Playlist. That being said, these experiments had an unexpected result that showed that Spotify has been recommending me great songs for years.
AI Playlist taught me to respect Discover Weekly again
A forgotten automation showed me what I’ve been missing
A recent Spotify update changed how we save our songs to playlists. It’s a feature I’ve mostly gotten used to, but an unexpected result is that it showed me how many of these “new” songs Spotify had already recommended.
Many years ago, I set up an automation with IFTTT that would save all the tracks recommended in Discover Weekly into a single playlist. This has been going on for years, and I have a few playlists in my library of over a thousand songs thanks to it. When I went to add my favorite songs recommended by AI Playlist, guess what? They were already in my Discover Weekly recommendations.
AI Playlist is great for music discovery, but it shouldn’t be your only tool
While AI Playlist has helped me discover new tracks, it’s also made me appreciate Spotify’s existing discovery tools. Looking to create a quick playlist of (mostly) new tracks? Use AI Playlist. Want to discover brand new songs? Listen to Discover Weekly regularly.
