Back in August, an APK teardown revealed that Google was working on Spotify integration for Gemini — one of the best AI chatbots around. Now, assuming you have an Android phone, it’s ready to use, a Google support page confirms.
It’s similar to the integration with YouTube Music. Rather than opening up the Spotify app and searching for the music you want, you can ask Gemini to find it for you. In its simplest form that can be asking for a specific song or album, or for Gemini to bring up an artist for you to browse yourself, which admittedly doesn’t feel any more advanced than what smart speakers have been doing for nearly a decade.
But it gets more interesting if you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking for, but know the kind of thing you’re after. Here, you can ask Gemini to find music that matches a specific activity — music for running or productivity, say — or tunes to fit whatever mood or genre you’re feeling.
What it can’t do, Google explains, is create a Spotify playlist or radio station, which is a pity, but Spotify users can use AI to create playlists within the app itself. A perk for Spotify Premium subscribers, AI Playlists lets you build a playlist based on a simple text prompt — “songs for a rainy day” or “music for the end of the world”, for example. We covered how to make AI playlists in Spotify here, if you’re yet to try it out.
But back to Gemini and its Spotify integration. It’s pretty easy to set up: first, you simply need to link your Google and Spotify accounts, which should be triggered by asking Gemini to play, search or browse music on Spotify. You’ll then get simple on-screen instructions to enable Gemini Apps Activity.
You can ask Gemini to find music that matches a specific activity — music for running or productivity, say — or tunes to fit whatever mood or genre you’re feeling.
Once that’s done, you’ll be able to use a number of prompts to fire up Spotify including “Play [album name] on Spotify”, “search for the song that goes ‘[lyric]’” or “play music for [activity]”. Note that the first time you use it, you’ll have to specifically namecheck Spotify if you’ve previously connected it to another service. After that, Spotify will become the default player for music-related Gemini interactions, until you ask for something else.
For now, this only works with the language set to English in Gemini, and it’s not available within the web app, Google Messages or on the iPhone. You can also only request specific songs if you subscribe to Spotify Premium, which is unsurprising given track selection is a key way in which Spotify upsells its paid version.
