Amazon Music has announced a new AI-powered playlist feature that allows users to turn text prompts into entire playlists. Called Maestro, the offering is still in beta and available only to a small number of Amazon Music users on all tiers in the United States on iOS and Android. It can be found on the app’s home screen or by clicking the plus button to create a new playlist.
The news follows Spotify’s recent announcement about its own AI playlist feature, designed to help users find new music based on the works they already listen to. Playlists will be generated based on a user’s specific text prompts about the desired vibe, situation and genre. Soundtrack Your Brand, a global music streaming service that provides music for businesses, launched an AI playlist generator last week.
AI has been a major component of music recommendations for years, helping services like Spotify and Amazon Music recommend new songs for users. The difference now is that, with these new features, streamers can create playlists based on text prompts encompassing sounds, activities, moods, places, emojis and more. Maestro will respond to a prompt by creating a playlist and generating an inventive title.
Like Spotify, Amazon Music has guardrails on what text prompts are allowed, barring any prompt that contains offensive language and “inappropriate prompts,” according to a post on the company’s website.
Amazon Music plans to roll out Maestro to more users, but for now, only a limited number of subscribers will have access to the feature. Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers will be free to listen to their playlists instantaneously, while Amazon Prime members and customers on the free (ad-supported) tier will be able to listen to 30-second previews of their playlists before saving.
