This isn’t Spotify’s first attempt at a running feature. Back in 2015 the company shipped Spotify Running, a tool that tapped your phone’s hardware to sense how fast you were moving and automatically queued up music to match. It was shut down in 2018.
Running Mode, revealed today, works nothing like that.
That distinction is the key to understanding Spotify’s latest fitness addition. Where the original monitored your body and adjusted on the fly, the new one sits and waits for you to fill out a form.
You define the workout, not the other way around
With Running Mode, you’re expected to spell out what you want from your workout playlist before you begin. The starting point is a selection of 25 curated running playlist presets, which you then filter by the genres you like, how long you plan to train, BPM and training method.
There are three training methods to choose between: interval, steady and pyramid.
Spotify pitches the feature as a way to “spend less time hunting for the right music and more time moving.” That reasoning holds up for a Sunday long run you’ve already mapped out. It holds up less well once your pace wanders and your playlist doesn’t follow.
The AI part is a Prompted Playlists descendant
Underneath, Running Mode leans on the personalization capabilities that arrived with Prompted Playlists last year. According to Spotify, fitness-related prompts have ranked among the most popular things people do with that feature — which is presumably why a running-specific product now exists.
In other words, this is a purpose-built front end bolted onto an engine Spotify already had, rather than something genuinely new. Anyone who has fed a workout prompt into Prompted Playlists and been happy with the results already has a good sense of what to expect.
There’s a coach, and it only speaks English
The feature also throws in optional audio prompts, which Spotify said deliver “timely cues and motivation without getting in the way of your music.” Those prompts only exist in English.
Note the word optional — it’s carrying weight here. The voice can be switched off completely, leaving you with a playlist generator that happens to have a BPM slider.
The availability list is short
A Premium subscription is required. The feature sits inside the Fitness hub that Spotify rolled out in April, and as of today it’s iOS-only.
The rollout covers seven countries: the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. Android users are left out for now, with no timeline offered by Spotify.
Who this is actually for
Runners who train to a structure — the sort who know in advance they want 20 minutes of intervals at a fixed BPM — will skip the search entirely. That’s a genuine if modest convenience, and it costs nothing extra on a subscription you already hold.
But if the thing you missed about Spotify Running was that it did the thinking for you, head into the Fitness hub, assemble a single pyramid preset, and judge for yourself whether dialling in your own tempo reads as control or as homework. First time through, it read as homework.