Motorola’s Playlist Studio just ruined Spotify’s algorithm for me

As a longtime Spotify user, there’s plenty that I love about the streaming giant. It knows my music tastes better than I do, and I start shared jams almost every time I hang out with my friends. Yet, I often find myself a little frustrated and somewhat bored by my carefully tuned algorithm — I like the songs it picks, and it knows I like those songs, so it just keeps picking the same ones.

But now, there’s an AI-powered solution on the table, and it comes from an unexpected place. Motorola just introduced the playlist generator I’ve been waiting for, and I think it just might get me to rethink my relationship with Spotify. Here’s why.

When OEMs decide it’s finally time to enter the AI race, they seem to do so with a familiar set of features. There are almost always tools to help you write better, keep you more organized, and generate images based on prompts or photos of your family and friends. Motorola is no exception. It’s come up with clever ways to take notes and voice recordings on your new Razr, and its Image Studio falls right in the sweet spot between Google’s Pixel Studio and Samsung’s Portrait Studio.

However, the feature that I think people will like to use most is the Playlist Studio. It’s a lot like an image generator in that you feed it prompts and spit back creations, but instead of a single image (or a series of images), you get a customized playlist of around ten songs to stream and save.

Motorola’s go-to example during our short time with the Razr 2025 series was to ask for “Y2K pizza party jams,” which might have been a little before my time, but it’s hard to argue with Beyonce’s Crazy in Love or Nelly’s Hot in Herre. I chose not to subject the briefing crowd to my preferred flavor of sad music, but I fully plan to test the feature further once I have time to dig deeper into the Razr Ultra in my day-to-day life.

Of course, Motorola isn’t the first to create an AI-powered playlist generator. Spotify debuted something similar in beta testing in early 2024 for subscribers in the UK and Australia before eventually expanding it to other English-speaking countries. I’ve since tried the feature (which remains in beta testing), and it works pretty well. However, it falls into the same problem that most of my other Spotify playlists suffer: It already knows my tastes too well.

For example, I pulled up Spotify’s AI Playlists menu, asked for “sad songs that would fit in the woods,” and got a playlist of 30 songs that are almost all on my Spotify-generated Moody Mix already, and I didn’t even have to ask for that one. I might not get as many songs at one time on Motorola’s side, but I’m weirdly grateful that the Playlist Studio is going in without an idea of my taste.

Unfortunately, there’s one sticking point to all the neat things I love about Motorola’s Playlist Studio: It only works with Amazon Music. Yes, that music streaming service that sits in a distant third place behind Spotify and Apple Music in terms of how many people I know who use it. I have a premium subscription thanks to my ongoing Amazon Prime membership, but I don’t think I’ve ever touched the platform outside of the few weeks I use a Fire tablet each year.

So, that means I either have to give Amazon Music another chance, trust Spotify to improve its AI algorithm (my hopes aren’t high), or go back and manually create everything that the Playlist Studio cooks up by hand. For now, I think I’ll wind up doing the latter, as it allows me to keep my existing podcast subscriptions, liked songs, and I’m already logged into Spotify on somewhere near 15 or 20 devices — not that I’m proud of that.

But honestly, if Motorola really wants to push people to use its Playlist Studio — and I really want to use its Playlist Studio — it will have to open the feature up a bit. Motorola packed its new Razrs with support for Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, and its own AI-powered features, so it should be able to export playlists to Spotify and YouTube Music at the very least. When that day comes, I’ll be more than happy to generate and share playlists until you’re sick of them — and then I’ll even share a few more.