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When iOS 26 was revealed, the headlining feature for Apple Music was AutoMix, a feature that would smoothly mix songs. AutoMix automatically DJ mixes songs together, changing the tempo, adding effects, and blending songs together at various jumping off points. This is unlike crossfade, which usually always has the same duration and always triggers at the very end of a song. Although third party services offered this feature, no streaming service had this feature until now.
Well, somewhat. Spotify had something that smoothly mixed songs together, but it was very limited, only working on a small number of editorial playlists. Additionally, said playlists were usually lo-fi beats and other easy to mix things. It likely wasn't expanded because the system wasn't complex enough. AutoMix was still much better and more sophisticated.
AutoMix works really well if I'm being honest. Sure, it doesn't activate for every song, and the transitions suck if your playlist has a diverse range of genres, but for an automated system it works quite good. And it can be used across the entire Apple Music catalog (excluding songs you upload to your library).
Spotify Mix
Seeing how Apple Music was not only cheaper than Spotify but starting to get major features that actually made people want to switch, Spotify decided to make their own mixing tool. In August, Spotify started testing Mix with a small number of users, before iOS 26 was officially released. Although accomplishing the same thing as AutoMix, Spotify Mix works completely differently.
AutoMix works anywhere. You can use it on stations, in queues, your own playlists, other people's playlists, wherever. It's simply a toggle in the queue that you can quickly turn on and off. Compare this to Spotify Mix, which is designed to be enabled on a per-playlist basis. You can only enable this on your own Spotify playlists, and enabling Mix gives the playlist a special presentation, clearly inspired by 80s-90s DJ culture, with the play button becoming a record and other details like a shine over the playlist cover.
Spotify Mix is designed to be controlled by the creator of the playlist. It defaults to the custom track order of the playlist. But the biggest feature about it is being able to customize the transitions between tracks to make your own experience. This sounds really cool in concept, but I doubt many people actually care enough to use this. Spotify gives you presets, but you can customize it. However, if you don't know much about music or audio terms, these settings won't be too helpful for you. While some users might love these settings, I expect most people to become confused by what a "3 band fade" is. Additionally, these settings aren't that customizable. You can only set preset options, you can't adjust curves, only the type of curve. And only some songs let you adjust the duration of the transition.
Additionally, the Spotify transitions just aren't as good. Compared to Apple Music, they feel much more flat. This is likely due to the transitions just being crossfade with a few extra effects. There is no tempo changing or anything. When you open the transition editor, it becomes clear that Spotify chooses the transition points at loudness peaks. In the end, it just feels like crossfade that doesn't always happen at the end of a track. I'm sure if you made your own transitions in the editor you could make something good, but once again I doubt many people are doing that.
Conclusion
In the end, Spotify Mix is a fun thing to mess around with, maybe enable it on your own playlists, but lacks. I feel this feature will slowly become forgotten unless Spotify can improve it. I see lots of potential, but unless things change, that potential will never be reached.