I Used to Make Mixtapes. Now I Just Talk to Spotify.

Remember sitting cross-legged on your bedroom floor, finger hovering over the Record button on the boombox, waiting for the DJ to please for the love of God stop talking so you could capture "Total Eclipse of the Heart" cleanly? Remember the heartbreak when you got the last second clipped? The careful Sharpie-on-cassette labelling? The 90-minute TDK with a side A and a side B you'd choreographed like a tiny narrative arc?

That was me, being a music curator. I’ve always loved music and playlist and “music for moods”.

Now — you got it, AI has come to your music!

You can open Spotify, type one sentence, and have a better playlist than anything you ever managed to assemble with a stack of CDs and a dual-deck stereo. You can ask an AI assistant to find you the perfect podcast for inspiration. You can even tap a single button and have a real-sounding DJ — who actually knows what you like — start spinning music for you, with chatter between songs, just like radio used to feel before it got so corporate.

Let me show you how, because honestly, this is the most fun midlife technology has been in a while.

A Tiny Bit of Backstory (You'll Want This for the Next Dinner Party Chat)

Spotify has been quietly building toward this moment for over a decade. Back in 2014 they bought a little MIT spin-off called The Echo Nest, which knew how to teach computers to "hear" music — to understand that two songs sound similar even if they're from different decades, genres, and continents. A year later, in 2015, they used that brain to launch Discover Weekly, the Monday-morning playlist that became suspiciously good at reading your mood. That was the trick that made millions of us trade in our iPods.

Then in 2022 they bought a voice-AI company called Sonantic — the one whose technology can make a synthetic voice sound so natural you forget it's not a person. Hold that thought; it matters in a minute.

Fast forward to right now (May 2026). Spotify has 761 million listeners and three new tricks worth knowing about. Here are all three.

Trick 1: Just Tell It What You Want (Prompted Playlists)

This is the one to start with today and my fav. Spotify's AI Prompted Playlists let you describe a playlist in plain English instead of hunting through pre-made ones. The system reads your prompt, cross-references your listening history, and builds it on the spot.

You'll find it in the Spotify app under Your Library → + (top right) → Prompted Playlist (you'll need Premium and the feature should be live in your region). When it asks "Describe your perfect playlist," resist the urge to type something boring like "workout music."

Here's a prompt to copy-paste — designed for us, not for a 24-year-old who's never had to think about pelvic floor exercises:

Notice what that prompt does: it gives vibe (feel 27 again), eras (late 80s/90s), named anchor artists (so the algorithm knows the lane), a discovery instruction (women over 40 I might not know), vetoes (no sad, no whispery), and a shape (60 minutes, ends on a cool-down). That's the formula. Once you've got it, you can swap in any occasion: dinner party with college friends, solo road trip, the hour after the kids leave for university and the house is suddenly very quiet.

Try it once and you'll be hooked. Save the ones that work — Spotify will keep them in your library and refresh them when you ask.

Trick 2: Meet Your AI DJ — A Radio Host Who Actually Knows You

This one is fun, my neice’s favourite, and it's the lightest lift of all three: you just press a button.

Remember that one DJ on the local station you actually liked? The one who didn't shout, didn't try too hard, and occasionally said something interesting between songs? Spotify rebuilt that — and made it personal to you.

AI DJ is a Premium feature that combines a curated stream of music (chosen from your listening history, your old favourites, and brand-new songs you might love) with short spoken interludes between tracks. Things like "Welcome back — I noticed you've been on a Fleetwood Mac kick this week, so let's start with something in that lane," or "Here's a track I think you missed when it came out in 1994." The voice sounds startlingly real because it's powered by that Sonantic technology I mentioned earlier. Since launching, 94 million Premium users have used it. As of this week, it's available in over 75 countries — including Canada — and it speaks English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese, each with its own DJ personality (Maia, Ben, Alex, Dani, and others).

To find it: open Spotify, look for the DJ card on your home screen (the icon is a green lob-sided circle on a blue background), or just search "DJ." Tap once and it starts.

Here's the part that makes it fun: you can talk to it. Tap the DJ button at the bottom of the screen any time you want to switch the vibe — and in the newer version, you can type a request or press the mic button and speak out loud. Try things like:

• "I went to university in the 80’s – Take me back to my university years."

• "Switch to something slower — I'm reading."

• "More like this artist, less like the last one."

• "Play something I'd love but have never heard before."

It will pivot, comment briefly on the change, and start a new run of songs. The more you tell it what you like and don't like (with the heart and skip buttons), the better it gets at reading you.

This is the closest thing to having Casey Kasem in your kitchen on a Sunday morning. And it requires zero effort beyond pressing one button.

Trick 3: Use Claude to Find Things You Didn't Know Existed

In April, Spotify launched a direct integration with Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant — same family as ChatGPT, just a different brand). It's free to use. You connect your Spotify account inside Claude once (it will ask for permission the first time), and from then on you can ask Claude things like:

• "Recommend me three podcasts about midlife and creativity that aren't preachy."

• "Find a playlist for hosting book club tomorrow night — eight women, mostly mid-50s, we want background music that isn't elevator-y."

• "What are some new artists this year who sound like Sade or Anita Baker?"

Claude will pull from Spotify's catalogue, hand you the results inside the chat (in Spotify container), and let you preview, save, or play right there. It's particularly good at the podcasts side, which Spotify search has historically been clunky about. If you've ever given up looking for a niche show you knew must exist, this is your fix.

Your Assignment This Week

Pick one. Just one.

If you want the easiest win: open Spotify, tap the DJ card on your home screen, and let it run while you make dinner tonight. See what it knows about you.

If you want the most creative win: copy that power-walk prompt above (or rewrite it for whatever moment in your life needs a soundtrack), paste it into Spotify's AI Playlist feature, and hit go. Then go for the walk.

You used to make mixtapes by hand because nobody was going to make exactly the right one for you. Turns out that's still true — except now the curator listens when you talk.

Press play. ▶️

Consider it decoded.

Written by Amanda · Midlife TechCurious