YouTube Gets Into the AI DJ Game to Rival Spotify

YouTube Music is rolling out a new feature through its YouTube Labs program, aiming to compete directly with Spotify’s AI DJ. The experimental AI powered music host feature is only available to a limited number of YouTube Premium subscribers for now. These virtual presenters are designed to add commentary, trivia, and background stories while listeners engage with their playlists, mixes, and radio streams.

YouTube says the feature is meant to “deepen your listening experience by sharing relevant stories, fan trivia, and fun commentary about your favorite music.” The idea is to mimic a radio DJ popping up between tracks to discuss the music playing—similar to Spotify’s AI DJ.

YouTube Premium subscribers who want to activate the feature will find a new ‘sparkle’ button on the app near the usual thumps-up/thumbs-down buttons. Once enabled, the AI commentary becomes a persistent part of the listening experience—but YouTube has enabled users to snooze the experience for an hour or a day at a time.

Spotify’s AI DJ has been active since 2023 and leans heavily into the platform’s personalization features. That DJ uses personal listening history to craft an evolving, radio-like listening journey, supplying facts and trivia about the songs after they play. The Spotify AI DJ even supports interactive voice requests in both English and Spanish for certain moods, genres, or activities, making it resemble an adaptable radio host for listeners.

Unlike Spotify’s AI DJ, these AI YouTube hosts do not assemble or curate entire playlists, rather they inject facts or context between existing tracks. Participants in the US are the first to access this new YouTube Labs feature, with expansion expected should feedback from the feature be positive enough.

YouTube is also highlighting the ‘experimental’ tag for this YouTube Labs experiment. Those who enable the feature are presented with a warning, “AI commentary can contain mistakes.”