AI Audio Updates: Spotify, Particle, ElevenLabs  🔗 **Source:** [AI Audio Updates: Spotify, Particle, ElevenLabs](https://share.snipd.com/episode/de237df3-a772-4d67-b774-78d19f47813f) ## Highlights - **Spotify Lets You Prompt Custom Playlists** - Spotify's prompted playlists let users craft custom playlists by writing detailed prompts instead of searching existing lists. - Prompts can specify vibe, era, mostly-new or library songs, and placement rules, but users hit caps (~20–30 prompts) during beta. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer I want to kick this off talking about Spotify's new feature. They have these AI powered, they call them prompted playlists, and they're rolling out to premium subscribers. It's not for everyone. And it's specifically in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Sweden. They did some earlier tests in New Zealand, and they've launched this in the US and Canada. So they're rolling this out more broadly. If you're in the US and Canada, you should have access to this already. It's pretty straightforward. Basically, instead of going and just searching for different playlists, which is what I will typically do, it will use AI to create them from scratch. Now, there's a bunch of pros and cons for this. And I mean, I'll automatically admit my bias in this. I've actually spent a decent amount of money invested into creating playlists and promoting them to get users to follow these playlists. And then if you have music that you put into that playlist, it automatically gets listened to. So this is a good way to get music listened to. And, you know, obviously you got to make good stuff that follows inside of your genre that your followers will like. But doing these AI playlists essentially kind of kills off that entire industry or that entire way of making content. Now, if I'm being honest, I think that this is probably where the future goes in a way. And that's because oftentimes, you know, as myself as someone that is a playlist creator, they call them playlist curators. I sometimes get really busy and I don't update my playlist for a month. And maybe there's a bunch of great songs that would have been perfect that the Spotify algorithm could have found that I didn't find. And so I think that that's an interesting concept. Now, will these playlists automatically be updated that you prompt? Probably not. So you also have to automatically prompt them. So the pros and cons here are that the user, while they will get a fresh playlist when they prompt it and create something cool that maybe a playlist curator, if they weren't on top of it, I wouldn't have added. You also would have to continuously kind of reprompt or regenerate that playlist to keep it fresh if you wanted new stuff in there. So possibly that's actually just making more work for the user. So pros and cons there. Besides that, I think there's a bunch of cool things you can do in the prompting itself. You can add things like the vibe, different scenarios, aesthetics, memory area, era, genre. You can say something like songs that feel like the final score of a specific movie. And you can also ask for mostly new music, or you can ask for mostly music from your library. So there's a whole bunch of really cool things there. I'll give you one example that I saw in a Spotify demo. They said, find one artist I haven't listened to yet, but would probably love, and an artist I've only heard one or two songs from and introduced me to them, build a playlist of songs that'll Give me an overview of their catalog. So it feels like I'm getting to know them, put the songs you think I'll like most in the top spots. So you type in something pretty long, elaborate and specific like this, and it generates it for you. Now, I think this is awesome for getting custom music exactly how you want the only downside is it's super cool to get this like you get to customize your algorithm basically and actually Gets the correct direction but also something as a user kind of kills me to be like man why couldn't they just like make like a i don't know like some sort of button that i push and automatically Does that for me like if there's if there's something people are frequently putting these huge long prompts or i don't want to have to be a quote unquote prompt engineer or someone that Has like these giant saved prompts in the notes app on my phone that I got to copy and paste into Spotify every time I want to get like this new fancy playlist. So that's just maybe, yeah, that's just me maybe complaining, but I really just wish the algorithm would automatically do most of the stuff for me because I don't want more work. I don't have to copy and paste every time I want a fresh Spotify playlist. But, you know, it's probably way less work than going and manually finding songs and finding playlists perhaps. So there's, you know, pros and cons. This is still in beta. I think a lot of users say that they're hitting caps after about 20 to 30 prompts. So you get 20, 30 prompts in and then it's not going to let you do anything. I think Spotify is managing costs and they're also trying to learn what kind of prompts are creating like the highest satisfaction, right? I think if people are doing 20 to 30, they're probably not getting what they want since I probably would need ([Time 0:02:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7b802b89-dcad-46c8-a0d2-5e5720eeefa8)) - **AI Playlists Threaten Curator Monetization** - AI-created playlists could disrupt human playlist curators and the small businesses built around promoting curated lists. - Jaeden notes creators invested time and money promoting playlists may see that model undercut by on-demand AI generation. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Now, there's a bunch of pros and cons for this. And I mean, I'll automatically admit my bias in this. I've actually spent a decent amount of money invested into creating playlists and promoting them to get users to follow these playlists. And then if you have music that you put into that playlist, it automatically gets listened to. So this is a good way to get music listened to. And, you know, obviously you got to make good stuff that follows inside of your genre that your followers will like. But doing these AI playlists essentially kind of kills off that entire industry or that entire way of making content. Now, if I'm being honest, I think that this is probably where the future goes in a way. And that's because oftentimes, you know, as myself as someone that is a playlist creator, they call them playlist curators. I sometimes get really busy and I don't update my playlist for a month. And maybe there's a bunch of great songs that would have been perfect that the Spotify algorithm could have found that I didn't find. And so I think that that's an interesting concept. Now, will these playlists automatically be updated that you prompt? Probably not. So you also have to automatically prompt them. So the pros and cons here are that the user, while they will get a fresh playlist when they prompt it and create something cool that maybe a playlist curator, if they weren't on top of it, I wouldn't have added. You also would have to continuously kind of reprompt or regenerate that playlist to keep it fresh if you wanted new stuff in there. So possibly that's actually just making more work for the user. So pros and cons there. Besides that, I think there's a bunch of cool things you can do in the prompting itself. You can add things like the vibe, different scenarios, aesthetics, memory area, era, genre. You can say something like songs that feel like the final score of a specific movie. And you can also ask for mostly new music, or you can ask for mostly music from your library. So there's a whole bunch of really cool things there. I'll give you one example that I saw in a Spotify demo. They said, find one artist I haven't listened to yet, but would probably love, and an artist I've only heard one or two songs from and introduced me to them, build a playlist of songs that'll Give me an overview of their catalog. So it feels like I'm getting to know them, put the songs you think I'll like most in the top spots. So you type in something pretty long, elaborate and specific like this, and it generates it for you. Now, I think this is awesome for getting custom music exactly how you want the only downside is it's super cool to get this like you get to customize your algorithm basically and actually Gets the correct direction but also something as a user kind of kills me to be like man why couldn't they just like make like a i don't know like some sort of button that i push and automatically Does that for me like if there's if there's something people are frequently putting these huge long prompts or i don't want to have to be a quote unquote prompt engineer or someone that Has like these giant saved prompts in the notes app on my phone that I got to copy and paste into Spotify every time I want to get like this new fancy playlist. So that's just maybe, yeah, that's just me maybe complaining, but I really just wish the algorithm would automatically do most of the stuff for me because I don't want more work. I don't have to copy and paste every time I want a fresh Spotify playlist. But, you know, it's probably way less work than going and manually finding songs and finding playlists perhaps. So there's, you know, pros and cons. This is still in beta. I think a lot of users say that they're hitting caps after about 20 to 30 prompts. So you get 20, 30 prompts in and then it's not going to let you do anything. I think Spotify is managing costs and they're also trying to learn what kind of prompts are creating like the highest satisfaction, right? I think if people are doing 20 to 30, they're probably not getting what they want since I probably would need like four different playlists and I could be happy for life. ([Time 0:02:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8489442d-515d-4790-a477-7709be5a396b)) - **Save Prompts Or Automate Playlist Requests** - Save complex prompt templates if you want repeatable, specific playlists since Spotify currently requires manual prompting each time. - Jaeden recommends automation or a single-button option would reduce friction for frequent custom playlist requests. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Besides that, I think there's a bunch of cool things you can do in the prompting itself. You can add things like the vibe, different scenarios, aesthetics, memory area, era, genre. You can say something like songs that feel like the final score of a specific movie. And you can also ask for mostly new music, or you can ask for mostly music from your library. So there's a whole bunch of really cool things there. I'll give you one example that I saw in a Spotify demo. They said, find one artist I haven't listened to yet, but would probably love, and an artist I've only heard one or two songs from and introduced me to them, build a playlist of songs that'll Give me an overview of their catalog. So it feels like I'm getting to know them, put the songs you think I'll like most in the top spots. So you type in something pretty long, elaborate and specific like this, and it generates it for you. Now, I think this is awesome for getting custom music exactly how you want the only downside is it's super cool to get this like you get to customize your algorithm basically and actually Gets the correct direction but also something as a user kind of kills me to be like man why couldn't they just like make like a i don't know like some sort of button that i push and automatically Does that for me like if there's if there's something people are frequently putting these huge long prompts or i don't want to have to be a quote unquote prompt engineer or someone that Has like these giant saved prompts in the notes app on my phone that I got to copy and paste into Spotify every time I want to get like this new fancy playlist. So that's just maybe, yeah, that's just me maybe complaining, but I really just wish the algorithm would automatically do most of the stuff for me because I don't want more work. I don't have to copy and paste every time I want a fresh Spotify playlist. ([Time 0:03:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e733da5d-7042-4993-945d-08ed16a3599a)) - **Particle Surfaces Podcast Clips In News Feeds** - Particle treats podcasts as first-class news sources and extracts short 'podcast clips' to surface inside a news feed alongside related stories. - The feature finds salient moments so users don't need to listen to full hour-long episodes to get the key takeaways. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Is doing. So they are an AI news app. They're built by the former, some former Twitter engineers. They're now treating podcasts kind of like a first class news source, not a separate medium that you go to. And I think this is this is interesting, right? They have a new feature, which is called podcast clips. And it basically finds interesting moments inside of podcasts. And it puts those clips alongside related news stories in their news feed. And I think basically what they're saying is that you shouldn't have to listen to an entire hour long episode just to find 45 seconds that actually matter. I actually, I think this is really cool. As someone that creates obviously a lot of podcast content, I host a lot of podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I think this is awesome. There's certain podcasts I listen to every week, for example, and they're like one or two hours long. And sometimes I just don't have the time to catch up. But it would be sweet to just be able to go and say like, hey, give me like the five top things happened that you know, the top moments, the things that were said. And some of those podcasts really do break news or give you insights that you can't get anywhere else because of people working on, you know, businesses or inside of organizations. So like there's really good juicy data in there, valuable stuff. And if I got a, you know, an hour long drive to work an hour long drive back, I'll get through that no problem. But sometimes I don't have to go to work or sometimes I don't have to do that long drive and I don't or I don't have a long flight and it'd be really nice to be able to just get the highlights. So, do think that that's very, very cool. They are wrapping this inside of a product strategy that is pretty familiar, and that's just basically a freemium plus subscription. So, if you get Particle Plus, it's $2.99 a month, or about $30 a year, and then you get all of those kind of summary controls. You get multiple voices for an audio feed. You can listen to the news. ([Time 0:06:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/319c1fbc-ff4b-4592-9450-e7196c3cfed8)) - **Use Particle Plus For Enhanced Podcast Highlights** - Try Particle Plus if you want richer podcast-to-news features like multiple voices and summarized controls for $2.99/month. - The freemium model reserves advanced audio feed customization and summary controls for paid subscribers. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer They are wrapping this inside of a product strategy that is pretty familiar, and that's just basically a freemium plus subscription. So, if you get Particle Plus, it's $2.99 a month, or about $30 a year, and then you get all of those kind of summary controls. You get multiple voices for an audio feed. You can listen to the news. There's a bunch of other cool premium features, but they do have some, you know, some elements of that that are paid. ([Time 0:07:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/05fe86f5-3276-4b29-af24-5d073b2fce17)) - **Host Spent Thousands On Eleven Labs Dubbing** - Jaeden shares he's spent nearly $10,000 on Eleven Labs credits for dubbing and voice cloning across his podcasts. - He uses Eleven Labs to clone voices, separate speakers, translate, and produce lip-syncable dubs for multilingual podcast distribution. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer One of my favorite AI audio companies, although they are so expensive that it kills me sometimes, but I have spent thousands of dollars. I might be getting close to $10,000 of Eleven Labs credits I've spent over my life. So obviously, I love this company. But I have a love hate relationship because it doesn't feel good to have spent $10,000 on a company in AI. But the places that 11 labs, I think are really crushing it lately. And also like full disclosure, I this is somewhere I spend a lot of money on as well is in things like audio dubbing. So recently I've had AI chat, AI hustle, AI applied through my top podcasts, all translated with dubbing via 11 labs into a whole bunch of different languages. So people could listen to this podcast in French, Spanish, German, Mandarin, like a whole bunch of different languages, but it's still my voice talking. So I think that that's a really cool feature that 11 Labs enables. And they have to do a bunch of creative things, especially if there's two different voices. You have to, you know, first take the voices and clone the voices. Then you have to determine, you know, which voice is which. So you have to identify who the two speakers are and kind of do those two voice clones separate. You got to do the translation, of course, which isn't too crazy. But then something that 11 Labs does that I'm impressed by is in order to get the lip sync working, meaning if you're going to use like an audio that gets translated for a movie, right, Let's say the movie clip is 30 seconds long, you don't want the audio file to come out after it gets translated into Spanish as like 45 seconds. And now because every word and every translation and phrase could be shorter or longer, it is pretty tricky to do this. But there are a bunch of like stretching tools and techniques that you can use. And so this is kind of what 11 Labs does. ([Time 0:07:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f18850b8-a339-4319-9ce4-7efa751c2b02)) - **Multilingual Dubbing Expands Monetization** - Audio dubbing and translation with voice cloning increases accessibility and monetization by unlocking new language audiences and advertisers. - Jaeden notes Spanish dubs can attract local advertisers that wouldn't buy spots on the English show. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer And they have to do a bunch of creative things, especially if there's two different voices. You have to, you know, first take the voices and clone the voices. Then you have to determine, you know, which voice is which. So you have to identify who the two speakers are and kind of do those two voice clones separate. You got to do the translation, of course, which isn't too crazy. But then something that 11 Labs does that I'm impressed by is in order to get the lip sync working, meaning if you're going to use like an audio that gets translated for a movie, right, Let's say the movie clip is 30 seconds long, you don't want the audio file to come out after it gets translated into Spanish as like 45 seconds. And now because every word and every translation and phrase could be shorter or longer, it is pretty tricky to do this. But there are a bunch of like stretching tools and techniques that you can use. And so this is kind of what 11 Labs does. So essentially, if you you can use these audio files as dubs for videos, and you see kind of the same technology with like Hey gen and people like that but i've been really impressed with How 11 lamps has done it and specifically you know i use this for podcasting a lot of other publishers and news organizations are also doing this and this is a really big money maker for 11 labs so i think the upside to this is obvious you get a lot more engagement and retention if you're this into other languages. ([Time 0:08:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fbf72f17-a856-482b-85d8-71586792f128)) - **AI Audio Is Moving Toward Conversational News** - AI audio is shifting discovery and consumption toward conversational, interruptible, and interactive formats across music, news, and podcasts. - Jaeden predicts the next phase emphasizes language, conversational audio, and news as interactive conversations rather than static pages. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer So overall, I think there's a lot going on. I think Spotify obviously is now making audio discovery a lot more like chatting with a smart assistant. Particle is now making podcast audio more like scanning headlines. And then publishers are now turning into audio by default. And then they're also going to be doing multilingual audio on demand. So all of these news organizations that used to just be articles are now becoming audio because they have this AI ability. And I think this is going to be a trend we see more and more into the future, which I'm pretty excited about. I think AI is showing up everywhere all at once. It doesn't just kind of make things more convenient. I think it really kind of changes how we consume media, whether that's podcasts, articles, or music. So I'm really excited about a lot of the advancements we've made in all three of those areas. I think the next phase is pretty obvious. You can kind of see where this is going if you look at the roadmap, and that's language. I think conversational audio, interruptible voice experiences, and then also kind of interactive news where the story is not just a page you read. It's kind of like a conversation that you're having with the news. I think these are some of these use cases, how they expand. A concept I've been thinking a lot about lately is that it's not just about who has the best AI model per se, and that's who's going to win in this. I think it's who can come up with the best use cases. ([Time 0:10:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6ed1c545-9c41-4a49-b107-9055a3d8b0b5))