YouTube Music Is Getting AI-Powered Playlists.
If you’re of a certain age, you might remember mixtapes: cassette tapes containing a series of tracks that you or a friend thought went well together, or that you simply liked. (They also required some effort to put together.) Digital music has largely replaced mixtapes, but in their place came playlists. You could easily curate a collection of your favorite songs and either burn them to CD or, with the rise of streaming, let the playlist grow as much as you wanted.
Anyone can create a playlist, but there’s an art to it. Someone with a keen ear for music can create a playlist that’s easy to listen to for hours. Perhaps you have a friend who’s a playlist maker, or perhaps you’re one of those people in your group. Playlists can be a great way to share music and discover new tracks to add to your collection.
Now, generative AI is aiming to completely replace human intervention. Instead of you or a friend creating a playlist, you can ask AI to do it for you. And YouTube Music is the latest service to try.
On Monday , YouTube announced a new AI-powered playlist generator in a post on X. If you have a YouTube Premium or YouTube Music Premium subscription, you can ask YouTube’s AI to create a playlist based on any parameters you desire. To try it out, open YouTube Music, then go to your library and click “New.” Next, select the new “AI Playlist” option and then enter the type of music you’re looking for. You could ask YouTube Music to create a playlist of pop-punk songs or something to listen to while you work. Basically, you can choose any option, and if the AI makes a mistake, you can try again.
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It’s all pretty simple, nothing revolutionary. Other music streaming services also use their own AI-powered playlist generators. Spotify, for example, has had one for a couple of years , but recently launched its “Suggested Playlist” feature , which allows you to create playlists that update over time and take your listening history into account. However, with this update, YouTube is likely trying to drum up interest in its streaming service and encourage users to pay for it. Just this week, the company made lyrics—a previously free feature —available only to Premium subscribers . I guess they figure that if you can’t read the lyrics of your favorite artists and want a bot to create playlists for you, you might just subscribe to their platform.
In the long run, this could be a good change for YouTube Music subscribers. I’m an Apple Music user, so I’m not particularly fond of AI-generated playlists. I enjoy Apple-curated playlists, as well as the ones my friends and I create and share. But who knows: maybe human-generated playlists will go the way of mixtapes.