Spotify's New AI: Taking Control of the Algorithm with Prompted Playlists

For the first time, Spotify is giving users the power to steer the algorithm. Gustav Söderström, Spotify's Co-President, CPO, and CTO, shared the vision behind Prompted Playlists, a feature enabling a new era of listener control.

What is Prompted Playlists?

The feature lets users write a custom prompt that Spotify can use—alongside their listening history—to create a playlist of new music. Subscribers can type exactly what they want to hear and how they want Spotify's algorithm to respond.

While past AI features took users' individual taste into consideration, Prompted Playlist taps into your entire Spotify listening history, all the way back to day one. It uses your entire listening history, not just recent activity, and can refresh on a schedule, making it a more flexible tool than Spotify's earlier AI experiments.

How Spotify's Algorithm Works in 2025

Spotify's recommender system is an extremely complex mechanism with dozens (if not hundreds) of independent algorithms, AI agents, and ML models. This system has been developed and iterated on for close to twenty years.

The core approach involves two components: content-based filtering (describing tracks by examining the content itself) and collaborative filtering (describing tracks through connections with other tracks). In 2025, Spotify prioritizes engagement metrics over raw stream counts, focusing on listener retention, save rates, and playlist additions.

Impact on Music Production

The first 30 seconds of a song are weighed very heavily within music recommendation systems. If a user skips a song within the first 30 seconds, the algorithm won't recommend it as much. Songs are now created to be engaging from the start—getting to hooks faster with fewer drawn-out introductions.

Challenges and Opportunities for Artists

Independent artists face higher acquisition costs for promotions, as algorithmic streams are harder to trigger without label-backed campaigns. Critics argue Spotify's focus on playlists over artists could pave the way for AI-generated music, reducing royalties for human creators.

Prompted Playlists gives listeners more control while making the black box of algorithmic music discovery slightly more transparent. For artists, it's both a challenge and an opportunity. Understanding and leveraging the algorithm will be a survival strategy in the 2025 music industry.