Spotify Expands AI Playlist Beta to 40 More Countries

Spotify expands its AI Playlist beta to 40 more countries as YouTube announces a very similar feature.

Spotify launched its AI Playlist beta a year ago, a feature that creates playlists on the fly based on listeners’ text prompts. After expanding the beta to a few more countries back in September, Spotify is now rolling the feature out to 40 more countries as the beta continues.

Now, Premium subscribers in countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean can “effortlessly turn their most creative ideas into playlists.”

And the timing couldn’t be better. Yesterday, YouTube Music announced a similar feature called Ask Music, though YouTube is describing this feature as a “personalized radio station,” rather than a playlist generator. But both are based around using text prompts to describe the type of music you want to listen to for an AI-generated output.

YouTube’s Ask Music is available in “select countries” for English-language subscribers to YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, as part of YouTube’s broader 20th birthday celebration.

But Spotify and YouTube are hardly alone in their efforts to capitalize on AI tools in their products. Amazon Music launched AI playlist generation with Maestro in April last year—around the same time Spotify announced its AI Playlist beta. Then, in July, Deezer came to the table with its own “Playlist with AI” functionality.

Meanwhile, Apple Music has been testing the waters with an AI artwork generator since last summer. The functionality allows users to create playlist artwork using AI as part of Apple’s Image Playground, which itself is part of the Apple Intelligence toolset.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of these companies’ AI features remain paywalled, available only to paid subscribers. That’s not by chance, especially given rumors that Spotify is going to launch yet another paid tier to accompany its newly bundled offerings and continued expansion into video content and audio books.