Spotify’s Prompted Playlists can help you find new podcasts to listen to
On Tuesday, Spotify expanded its Guest Playlists feature to include podcasts, an update that could make it easier for Premium users to find new shows to listen to. Guest playlists initially launched in beta in December, but previously only worked for music. You can use this feature to efficiently generate personalized Discover Weekly playlists using text prompts to “steer the algorithm” toward specific genres or themes.
Tuesday’s update lets you do the same thing with podcast episode playlists. However, the feature is still in beta and is currently only available in English for Premium users in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.
When I tried the updated feature, Spotify’s AI took several minutes to generate my podcast playlist (including a step described as “humor check”), but I was surprisingly happy with the results. I requested a playlist of Dungeons & Dragons real drama shows, including a mix of popular series and hidden gems. My first prompt highlighted an issue worth noting if you’re using this feature for podcasts: it will pull random episodes from shows, which could be a problem if a show is designed for chronological listening.
However, it was pretty easy to fix. After generating a playlist, you can come back and edit your prompt to update the playlist. I added a line specifying that the playlist should only include the first episodes of campaigns or shows. The new sampling the AI gave me was more comprehensive than I expected, including a few episodes of Rating 20 And Critical role as well as a few smaller shows that I’ve never heard of before or haven’t had a chance to listen to yet, like Tales of the Stinking Dragon And Join the party.
Each episode in the playlist also included a brief AI-generated description of how the episode fits into my prompt. While I’m generally skeptical of AI-generated summaries like this, the summaries of the shows I watched were accurate, like describing Dimension 20: High Fantasy as “funny with real issues”. It’s vague, but at least not misleading.
You can manually add and edit guest playlists after generating them, or keep updating them if you’re not a fan of the podcast episodes the AI pulls for you. While I still don’t plan to use this feature for music, it might be useful to some listeners when it comes to podcasts, especially compiling a “first episode” sample pack like this one. You can also set the playlist to refresh regularly so you can get new podcast samplers daily or weekly.
To try the feature, go to the Spotify app and select “Create,” then choose “Guest Playlist” from the menu. In the prompt text box, describe the type of podcast episodes you want the playlist to include and click “Generate Playlist.” The first few times I tried it, I got an error message saying that guest playlists don’t support podcasts yet. The issue was resolved after updating the app.
