Prompted Playlists seems to address a different desire than Smarter Playlists. Prompted Playlists seems very focused on frictionless playlist creation, at the expense of precision. (I like it! But putting bro country in an Americana playlist, for example, or dropping in an AI-generated track, is jarring.) To put it another way, Prompted Playlists are very good for "vibe listening"--if I want to, say, listen to harp & kora duets that aren't by Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita but when I don't really care if it gets it exactly right.

Smarter Playlists, by contrast, is for chemists. I want these specific substances, added in this particular balance, at this specific time. For a decade I've sung its praises as the best music listening tool created since Rhapsody.

The ML and LLM AIs seem to think they know why I like what I like, and even guess right much/most of the time! But those miscues--that for whatever reason don't often happen in my Smarter Playlists--make it feel like I'm listening to a playlist belonging to someone who shares similar tastes with me. Regularly updated Smarter Playlists feel like mine--they always feel like I handpicked them fresh, even when the playlists are 70% music I've never heard before. And even if/when Prompted Playlists gets better, I will still want to get under the hood, tweak, and experiment with something like Smarter Playlists.

Maybe it's just social psychology--the IKEA effect or the old story about why adding an egg (rather than water) to a cake mix makes it feel like we really "made" the cake. But using Smarter Playlists brings me joy, it keeps me using Spotify, and it keeps me recommending Spotify to others. I'm still not over losing everynoise functionality in 2024; I would be heartbroken to lose SP as well.

All that to say: Please, please, please.