If you’re of a certain age, you might remember mixtapes: cassettes made up of a series of tracks you or a friend think work well together, or otherwise enjoy. (They took some work to put together, too.) Digital music sort of killed mixtapes, but, in their place, came playlists. You could easily put together a collection of your favorite songs, and either burn them to a CD, or, as streaming took over, let the playlist itself grow as large as you wanted.
Anyone can make a playlist, but there’s an art to it. Someone with a keen ear for music can build a playlist you can let play for hours. Maybe you have a friend who’s good at making playlists, or maybe you’re that friend in your group. They can be a fun way to share music, and find some new music to add to your own library.
Now, generative AI wants to replace human intervention altogether. Rather than you or a friend building a playlist, you can ask AI to do it for you. And YouTube Music is the latest service to give it a try.
YouTube announced its new AI playlist generator in a post on X on Monday. If you subscribe to either YouTube Premium or YouTube Music Premium, you can ask YouTube’s AI to make a playlist based on whatever parameters you want. To try it out, open YouTube Music, then head to your Library and tap “New.” Next, choose the new “AI Playlist” option, then enter the type of music you’re looking for. You could ask YouTube Music to generate a playlist of pop-punk songs, or to make something to play when focusing on work. Really, it’s whatever you want, and if the AI gets it wrong, you can try it again.
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It’s pretty straightforward, and nothing revolutionary. Other music streaming services have their own AI playlist generators too. Spotify, for example, has had one for a couple of years, but recently rolled out Prompted Playlist as well, which lets you generate playlists that update with time, and takes your listening history into account. With this update, however, YouTube is likely trying to drum up some interest in its streaming service and encourage users to pay for it. Just this week, the company put lyrics—once a free feature—behind the Premium paywall. I suppose it thinks that if you can’t read what your favorite artists are singing, and you’d like to have a bot make your playlists for you, you might just subscribe to its platform.
This could be a good change in the long run for YouTube Music subscribers. I’m on Apple Music, so I don’t really use AI-generated playlists. I like the Apple-curated playlists, as well as the ones my friends and I make and share. But who knows: Maybe human-generated playlists are going the way of the mixtape.