Amazon Music Launches an AI Playlist Generator

Following in the footsteps of Spotify, Amazon today announced its own AI playlist generator, Maestro, which is now available in beta.

“Today, Amazon Music announces a new feature that uses AI technology to make it easier and way more fun to build playlists you want, when you want,” the announcement post reads. “Meet Maestro: An AI playlist generator that helps you create any playlist you can think of—plus all the ones you can’t. This feature is rolling out in beta to a small number of U.S. customers on all tiers of Amazon Music.”

That’s interesting: Spotify’s AI Playlist feature is available only to paying subscribers. But the two are otherwise similar. You use a prompt–a great example of how the language of AI is suddenly permeating our lives—to create a playlist. This prompt can be short or long, it can use emojis or emoticons, or activities or sounds. Or, you can just choose from a selection of suggested prompts. Amazon recommends something like “songs that sound like [whatever].” Simple.

Since this is AI, Amazon offers the usual caveats: This technology is new, it won’t always get it right the first time, and it’s trying to proactively block offensive and inappropriate prompts. But people are terrible, so they’ll figure out a way around that. And the game continues.

There are some limitations, of course. While Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can listen to AI-generated playlists instantly and save them for later use, Prime members and ad-supported customers have to listen to 30-second previews of their playlists before saving them, Amazon says.

Availability is perhaps the biggest issue: For now, Maestro is in beta and only available to “a subset of Free, Prime, and Unlimited Amazon Music customers in the U.S.” and only in the iPhone, iPad, and Android apps. That will expand to more customers “over time,” Amazon says.