Apple has pushed out the latest software update for iPhones, iOS 26.4. No, that doesn’t sound like an inspiring first sentence for a big music story, but the update is accompanied by some significant additions to Apple Music.
One of them was leaked earlier this year but is now official: ‘Playlist Playground’. It’s Apple Music’s take on prompt-generated playlists, powered by its Apple Intelligence tech.
Listeners describe the playlist they want to create using natural language, and can then adjust “elements such as mood or energy” while creating their own artwork, then save the results to their library and share it with others.
For now, the new feature is only available in the US for Apple Music subscribers with English set as their preferred language, although from launch it’ll work on the service’s Android app as well as iPhone and iPad.
‘Playlist Playground’ marks Apple Music’s arrival at the prompt-personalisation party. Spotify has been rolling its ‘Prompted Playlist’ feature out globally; YouTube Music recently debuted its own ‘AI Playlist’ feature; and Amazon Music and Deezer showed off their own tests in 2024.
What else is new for Apple Music this week? Two new ticketing-focused partnerships: with Ticketmaster and Bandsintown.
The former deal is powering the service’s new ‘Concert Discovery’ feature, showing concert listings within the Apple Music app – both on its homepage, on artist profiles and in a dedicated ‘Concerts’ tab.
Meanwhile, the Bandsintown integration will ensure that artists’ listings appear on their profiles and within the new tab too. Artists can set it up by toggling the ‘Apple Music’ option in Bandsintown’s ‘Integrations’ menu.
In both cases, the partnerships also tie in to ticketing features elsewhere in Apple’s family of apps: Shazam, Apple Maps and Photos as well as its ‘Spotlight’ search function.
Spotify recently said that it has driven more than $1.5bn in ticket sales from its concert discovery features, up from $1bn by the first half of 2025.
That’s evidence that these features can help to fill venues, so Apple Music’s expansion of its own ticketing integrations is good news for artists.
For all the DSPs, these expansions also set up possible future developments if and when they launch so-called ‘supremium’ tiers: more-expensive monthly subscriptions that add features and benefits for their users.
Early last year, Live Nation boss Michael Rapino said that his company had been in talks with “Spotify and Apple and Amazon” about potentially making inventory available in pre-sales to those supremium subscribers.
“We’ve been working with all three of them trying to find a model that may work for us and them, and I assume that they’re talking to others also,” he told analysts at the time.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
