Napster taps ChatGPT for its new playlist-creation feature – Music Ally
Music Ally
Music industry consultancy covering digital music marketing and strategy
Conversational interfaces are almost certainly going to play a role in the next wave of new features for streaming services, as they explore what ChatGPT and similar technologies might do for music discovery.
Napster is the latest to give the idea a spin with a feature called PlaylistGPT. It uses ChatGPT and sister service DALL-E to create AI-generated playlists based on listeners’ prompts.
Anyone can give it a try, although only Napster subscribers can actually save the playlists and listen to them in full. It thus functions as a marketing campaign too: non-subscribers will be encouraged to sign up for a free trial.
DALL-E’s role is to create artwork for these playlists, and there is a rating system which Napster says will help it “refine the algorithm to provide better playlist results over time”.
We’ve been putting it through its paces with prompts ranging from ‘Songs about AI’s threat to humanity’ to ‘Songs by metal bands about animals’ and it’s performed fairly well, apart from thinking that Tame Impala, Bob Marley and Mumford & Sons (!) are metal bands.
There are some good guardrails though: testing its moderation with a request for ‘neo-Nazi anthems’ generated a ‘Unity and Diversity’ playlist instead, with tracks celebrating those concepts.
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