Review: Apple Music's AI Playlist Playground Beta Struggles with Music Genre Understanding
By
Terrence O’Brien
The kind of bagel that ruins lesser bagels for you.
Summary
The article reviews Apple's new Playlist Playground beta feature in Apple Music, which uses AI to generate playlists based on text prompts. The author tests the feature with specific music requests like 'atmospheric instrumental black metal to write to' and finds it consistently fails to understand genre requirements, delivering tracks with vocals when instrumental was requested. The article compares Apple's AI playlist generator unfavorably to YouTube Music's similar feature, noting that while YouTube Music also has flaws, it performs significantly better at understanding prompts and delivering appropriate music.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledI am skeptical of AI's ability to serve up the music I want to begin with, but even I was caught slightly off guard by how underwhelming Apple's new Playlist Playground beta is.
YouTube Music's AI playlist generator is far from perfect, but when I gave it the same prompt for instrumental black metal, it wasn't until the fifth track that it delivered something with lyrics, and that was the exception, rather than the rule.
Apple Music failed to deliver from moment one, and did so repeatedly.
The Playlist Playground beta creates Apple Music playlists using AI based on text prompts, but doesn't understand genre, time, or much of anything.
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