Oh, Spotify. How I adore you and your odd range of features.
For the Apple Music users among us, Spotify may seem like any other streaming service, just with very vocal fans. To the casual user, Spotify is great for making playlists and discovering new music. However, there is a whole other world of features that Spotify has been piloting over the past year, meant to capture the excitement of their annual Spotify Wrapped. January 2023 brought us Playlist in a Bottle, a time capsule playlist that you could only listen to after it got opened a year later. After launching the Daylist feature (check out my full opinions on Daylists here) and audiobook access in the fall of 2023, fans were wondering what new feature Spotify was going to drop next. Only the fortune tellers saw this one coming.
Song Psychic started popping onto users’ homepages at the end of February, announcing that the app is ready to take you on a journey of enlightenment. The premise is that users will pick from one of nine categories, select a question or type their own, and Spotify will generate a song “from the cosmos” that is the answer they seek. Think of a Magic Eight Ball, but for Gen-Z.
The categories include School, Love, My Future, Life’s Great Mysteries, and the mysterious “Lunch.” Each category then has a set of questions you can ask the Song Psychic, or you can have Spotify choose a question for you. Note: If you choose Lunch as your category, your only question option is “What should I have for lunch?”
There are lots of fun and creative answers to these questions on Spotify’s end, here are some of my favorites:
- Question: Am I the drama?
- Song Psychic’s Response: “yea, babe, no way” by LANY
- Question: Will I get that job I applied for?
- Song Psychic’s Response: “No Idea” by MUNA
- Question: What should I have for lunch?
- Song Psychic’s Response: “Ribs” by Lorde
- Question: Can a mobile experience by an audio streaming service actually predict the future?
- Song Psychic’s Response: “Why” by Dominic Fike
Spotify is self aware that this algorithm is certainly not predicting the future (though I wanted more certainty about that job I applied for…), but this is one of the reasons I love Spotify. They are constantly thinking of clever new ways to engage with users and bring new music to people. If you want to try your luck with the Song Psychic and see what your future holds, you can find it by searching “Song Psychic,” and the experience is categorized as a genre.