Amazon Music is coming for Spotify’s AI playlists with new Maestro feature

AI features are becoming increasingly integrated with music streaming platforms – just take a look at Spotify and it’s 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.

Joining the likes of the best music streaming services, Maestro marks the beginning of Amazon Music’s venture into AI features. Maestro is currently rolling out in beta to a selected number of subscribers in the US, and will be available across all tiers of the service in the Amazon Music app for iOS and Android.

Amazon Music describes Maestro as “an AI playlist generator that helps you create any playlist you can think of – plus all the ones you can’t”. From its first look, Maestro adopts a similar process to Spotify’s AI playlist feature, taking the chatbot approach where you can type or speak prompts which will curate a unique playlist – and you can even use emojis to be more specific with your prompts.

In addition to emojis, Amazon Music says that you can also use emotions, activities, and sounds to create more specific playlists. And by the looks of it, you can be as unhinged with your prompts as you’d like – just try ‘music my grandparents made out to’ or ‘I want to recycle my boyfriend’.

If you’re stuck with a prompt 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’.

(Image credit: Amazon / Amazon Music)

Though it’s an exciting step for Amazon Music, Maestro is still in its early stages of development and Amazon has warned that the feature “won’t always get it right the first time”. Despite this, Amazon has already implemented a system that blocks offensive language and inappropriate prompts from being used, and plans to use this testing period to gather user feedback and apply it to Maestro’s development.

It’s evident that Amazon is doubling down on its AI integrations, following the roll out of its AI Skills apps for Alexa and its most recent Rufus chatbot that makes impulsive buying even more tempting. With Maestro, there’s no doubt that Amazon is playing catch up to its music streaming competitors, but is the new addition of its AI playlist generator a direct punch to Spotify’s gut?