AI features are increasingly integrated with music streaming platforms – just look at Spotify and its wildly popular AI DJ. Now Amazon Music is about to dip its toes into the pool of robot-generated playlists, recently announcing the addition of a feature called Maestro, its new AI playlist generator.
Maestro joins the ranks of the top music streaming services and marks the beginning of Amazon Music’s venture into AI features. Maestro is currently being rolled out in beta to select subscribers in the US, and will be available at all levels of the service in the Amazon Music app for iOS and Android.
Amazon Music describes Maestro as “an AI playlist generator that lets you create any playlist you can imagine – plus all the playlists you can’t.” His first sightMaestro uses a similar process to Spotify’s AI playlist feature, taking the chatbot approach where you can type or speak prompts that create a unique playlist – and you can even use emojis to be more specific with your prompts.
In addition to emojis, Amazon Music says you can also use emotions, activities, and sounds to create more specific playlists. And it looks like you can be as loose with your prompts as you like – try ‘music my grandparents sang’ or ‘I want to recycle my friend’.
If you’re stuck with a quick idea or have exhausted your creativity, you have the option to choose from a selection of suggested prompts, such as ‘soundtrack for a lazy day’, ‘afrobeats energy boost’ or ‘make my baby a genius’ ‘.
While it’s an exciting move for Amazon Music, Maestro is still in the early stages of development and Amazon has warned that the feature “won’t always work right the first time.” Despite this, Amazon has already implemented a system that blocks the use of offensive language and inappropriate prompts, and plans to use this testing period to collect user feedback and apply it to the development of Maestro.
It’s clear that Amazon is doubling down on its AI integrations, after introducing its AI Skills apps for Alexa and its latest Rufus chatbot that makes impulsive buying even more tempting. With Maestro, there’s no doubt that Amazon is overtaking its competitors in music streaming, but is the new addition of its AI playlist generator a direct blow to Spotify?