Finding a great podcast has always been harder than finding a great song. Music discovery has algorithms, charts, and decades of refinement behind it. Podcasts, with their sprawling back catalogs and thousands of new shows every week, have always been trickier to navigate.
Spotify is now taking a direct swing at that problem. Starting today, the company’s Prompted Playlist feature, which launched earlier this year for music in the US and Canada, is expanding to include podcasts. It is currently rolling out in beta for Premium users in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden, and works in English only for now.
Prompted Playlist is Spotify’s AI-powered feature that lets you describe what you want to listen to in plain language and then builds a personalized playlist around that. To get started, you tap “Create” in the app and select Prompted Playlist.
From there, you type in your request. You could ask for a playlist of highly rated true crime series full of twists, a lineup of the latest entertainment news covering music and film, or a deep dive into science and weird discoveries.
Spotify’s algorithm then pulls from your listening history alongside real-time signals like trends and charts to build something that feels both personal and current.
You can edit your prompt or start completely fresh at any time, giving you full control over the direction of your playlist. Each episode that lands in your playlist comes with a short note explaining why it was included, so you understand the connection rather than just being handed a random list.
You can also set your playlist to refresh daily or weekly so it never goes stale, with the option to choose specific days for weekly updates.
If you aren’t sure where to begin, Spotify’s own culture team has created ready-made prompts that appear on your Home screen, designed to give you a starting point that you can then customize to your own taste.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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