Spotify has a new trick for those moments when you know exactly what you want to hear, but none of your existing playlists quite get the vibe right. Prompted Playlist is Spotify’s latest AI-powered tool for Premium users, and it’s all about letting you steer the recommendation engine with oddly specific, almost human-level instructions instead of generic genre filters or mood buttons.

Think of it as talking to your overachieving music nerd friend who also happens to remember every track you’ve ever played. You don’t just say “chill lofi,” you say “instrumental tracks I haven’t overplayed yet that are good for deep work on a rainy evening,” and it will actually try to build around that brief — pulling from both your listening history and what’s trending in the wider music world. Spotify trialed the feature in New Zealand last year, and now it’s rolling out to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada by the end of January, just ahead of yet another price hike.​

What makes Prompted Playlist different from Spotify’s earlier AI Playlist experiment is how much control it hands back to you. The company is positioning this as a way to “control the Spotify algorithm,” which is a bold way of saying you can now nudge, correct and fine-tune its assumptions instead of passively accepting what Discover Weekly throws at you. You can tell it to build a playlist using only songs you’ve already saved to your Library but haven’t listened to in a while, which is a genius way to resurface stuff that’s been buried under years of daily mixes and algorithmic noise. Or you can go super specific and ask for music from a particular TV show or movie, leaning on Spotify’s access to real-time pop culture data, charts and historical trends.

Once the playlist is generated, it doesn’t just sit there like a static mixtape. You can choose to have it refresh automatically on a daily or weekly cadence, which turns it into a living feed shaped by your original prompt and your ongoing listening behavior. If the results are slightly off, you don’t have to start over: you can edit the original prompt at any time, refining it the way you’d tweak a search query or a ChatGPT prompt until it “gets” you. Every track also comes with a short explanation of why it was chosen, a small but welcome bit of transparency in a world where recommendation systems usually behave like black boxes.

Spotify says early testers used Prompted Playlist in surprisingly personal ways: to reconstruct the soundtrack of specific life moments, to bring back songs tied to a particular year, trip or relationship, or to politely sideline tracks they’d burned out on without losing the artists entirely. Others went the utility route, asking for long, lyric-free electronic playlists to get through a workday or for mixes that blend artists at the center of current pop culture moments and viral trends. It’s a subtle but important shift from “play something good” to “play something good for this exact context in my life right now.”​

Of course, the branding is messy in classic Spotify fashion. There’s already an “AI Playlist” feature, which isn’t going away. That earlier tool is simpler and more opaque; Prompted Playlist is the nerdier, more powerful sibling that can sift through more data and offers much finer tuning. For users, that means you may now see both options side by side: one for quick, loose AI-generated vibes and another when you’re in the mood to be oddly specific and a bit controlling about what comes next.​

Once the rollout hits your account, accessing the feature is straightforward. Inside the app, you tap Create and then select Prompted Playlist to start typing what you’re in the mood for. The feature is limited to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada for now, with Spotify saying everyone in those regions should have access by the end of the month. Given the timing alongside a subscription price increase, it’s hard not to see Prompted Playlist as part of Spotify’s case that the service is becoming more than “just” a giant jukebox — it’s an adaptive, AI-assisted music layer that learns how you think about sound, not just what you click on.

For power users, this might be the closest Spotify has come to exposing the dials behind its famous algorithm without actually giving you a raw settings menu. You’re still not editing recommendation weights or turning knobs labeled “explore vs comfort zone,” but prompting your way through “more of this, less of that” with natural language is an approachable middle ground. If it works as advertised, Prompted Playlist could turn the algorithm from an invisible force you tolerate into a collaborative partner you can argue with a little — and still end up with a better soundtrack for whatever you’re doing.