Spotify has introduced a feature that turns plain-English prompts into personalised playlists, combining a user's listening history with real-time trends across music and culture to generate tailored queues on demand.
Prompted Playlist, which the company announced on 23 February, accepts requests ranging from broad moods and activities to specific eras, genres, and cultural moments. Spotify says the tool "draws on your full listening history and combines it with what's happening across the world of music and culture right now," meaning generated playlists mix familiar tracks a listener already knows with songs reflecting current trends.
Each track in a generated playlist comes with a short one-liner explaining why it was included. Users can edit their original prompt or start fresh if the first result misses the mark.
What you can ask it to build
Spotify published three example prompts to show the range of the tool. One generates a nostalgia-fuelled mix of 2000s British pop, blending a user's most-replayed tracks from that era with the period's defining hits. Another surfaces newer Australian artists, including First Nations creators, for listeners looking to discover music outside their usual rotation. A third introduces a single new-to-you artist and places that artist's top-recommended tracks in the first five slots of the playlist.
The examples suggest Spotify is positioning the feature as useful for both comfort listening and active discovery, two modes with different commercial stakes for the platform as it competes with Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music for subscriber loyalty.
Refresh cycles and how to access it
Users can set a generated playlist to refresh daily or weekly, which would keep the selection current without requiring a new prompt each time.
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To try the feature, Spotify directs listeners to tap Create, select Prompted Playlist, and enter a prompt. The company closed its announcement with the line, "Where will your words take you?" The marketing framing positions the feature as exploratory rather than purely functional, though whether casual listeners engage with it as deeply as power users remains to be seen.
Spotify hosts nearly 9 billion playlists, a figure that underlines both the scale of the platform's existing catalogue infrastructure and the degree to which playlist creation is already central to how its users experience music. Prompted Playlist sits inside that existing behaviour rather than asking listeners to adopt an entirely new habit, which may work in its favour.
The recap
- Spotify introduces Prompted Playlist feature on February 23, 2026.
- Spotify hosts nearly 9 billion playlists across its service.
- Users can tap 'Create' and choose Prompted Playlist.