Nearly a year ago, Spotify rolled out the AI-generated playlist maker called “daylist” on its wildly successful streaming music platform. The ever-changing playlist (updated every day, every few hours) pulls from your own playlist to create a roughly three-hour batch of songs based on that day and time with strangely captivating names like “cottaged easy rock thursday early morning” that include equally oddball descriptions.
If you’ve never tried it, daylist does a pretty good job of curating tunes for you based on your listening habits. We love opening the phone a few times a day and finding out what bizarre mish-mash of songs it has spun up for us. But, there are a few drawbacks and some things we’d love to see changed.
Give us some modest control over the choices.
One of the drawbacks of having a streaming listening device in your kitchen attached to your Spotify account is that everyone has access, which means your song selections can run a pretty wide range from things you really like to things you…really don’t. Additionally, a playlist we may have created for a vibe – a summer party, for example – might not be a perfect rundown of what we want.
We aren’t suggesting we get into the algorithm and mess around. That’s why we have the ability to make our own playlists. But, having the ability to thumbs-up or thumbs-down a selection could help to better refine daylists to come. Even being a aware of songs skipped rapidly would make the lists more impactful over time.
Help us expand our musical knowledge.
One of the great things about all streaming services is the ability to find any music you want at any time. The downside of that versus someone else’s playlist (think a good radio DJ) is that you have to find new stuff on your own, which is daunting and time consuming. One way to assist with that would be for daylist to pull from catalogs they think we might like to mix in with things they know we already do.
A true benefit of the “you might also like” suggestions already built into Spotify is that they are often right. “Listening to Wilco? You might like The Replacements.” While daylist does this to some degree, it casts a pretty small net. It would be really cool if the lists included deep cuts or less popular artists in the same genre to help us discover something new.
Provide new artists an opportunity by getting them into these feeds.
It’s tough enough for emerging musicians to get a foothold in today’s music marketplace, but to be buried deep inside a repository for virtually every song ever written is brutal. We’re not saying Spotify should make every third song something from a new artist, but maybe one or two on each daylist would be not only a way to learn about new music, but a chance for those trying to make a name for themselves to be heard by a wider audience.
Loop in adjacent feeds from other Spotify users.
Heavy Spotify users often have deep, imaginative lists in their feeds. Why should they be the only ones to enjoy that diversity? If there are crossover songs, genres or even locations (an all-Houston Spotify list sounds rad), get them into our daylist stat. We don’t need to know where it came from, but it is a simple way for the algorithm to find options while still delivering the consistency the daylist has become known for.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
