Spotify Playlist Generator
Have you ever wished for a smarter way to discover and create playlists on Spotify? While Spotify is testing an AI-powered playlist creation feature in select markets, I decided to take matters into my own hands and explore what's possible with existing AI tools. Here's how I built my own AI-powered playlist creator using ChatGPT and Spotify's API.
Testing the Waters
My experiment started with a simple question: Could ChatGPT understand music well enough to recommend songs? I began by asking it to suggest tracks similar to specific songs I enjoyed. To my surprise, the recommendations were surprisingly on point! The AI seemed to grasp not just genre similarities, but also the overall vibe, energy, and musical elements that made songs feel related.
Encouraged by these results, I decided to push things further. What if we could create entire playlists based on more complex prompts? I started feeding ChatGPT with more nuanced requests, like "Create running playlist based on classics from 80s" or "Give me songs that sound like 'River' by Bishop Briggs but with different artists." The responses were fascinating – ChatGPT not only provided relevant song suggestions but also explained its reasoning, highlighting similar musical elements, energy patterns, and thematic connections.
From Recommendations to Automation
The next logical step was automation. Could I streamline the process of actually creating these playlists in Spotify? I turned back to ChatGPT for help, and it delivered a comprehensive guide for using Spotify's API to programmatically create playlists with the list of Prerequisites and Steps to follow
Prerequisites
- A Spotify account
- A Spotify Developer account
- Python installed on your computer
- Basic familiarity with running Python scripts
Steps
Setting Up Your Spotify App
Authentication Setup
Prepare Your Development Environment
The Python Script
The initial implementation wasn't perfect – there were a few bugs in the provided code, particularly around authentication and error handling. However, ChatGPT proved equally helpful in debugging these issues. With the second attempt, I ended up with a working Python script that could automatically create playlists from our AI-generated song lists.
Looking Ahead
Now that I have this setup working, I'm excited to experiment with different types of prompts and see what unique playlists I can create. Some ideas I'm planning to try:
- Emotional journey playlists that tell a story through music
- Genre-blending playlists that find unexpected connections between different styles
- Time-travel playlists that mix songs from different decades with similar vibes
It's worth noting that Spotify themselves are currently beta-testing their own AI playlist creation feature in certain countries. I'm really curious to see how their implementation compares to my DIY approach. Will their AI understand music differently? Will it have access to better metadata for making connections between songs? Once the feature becomes more widely available, it'll be fascinating to compare results.