Apple Music’s Facebook Messenger Bot Now Gives Emoji-Based Music Suggestions

If your love for a song has caused you to drop the infamous “heart eyes” emoji in a text or social media post, Apple’s latest addition to Facebook Messenger may be the technical innovation you’ve been waiting for.

This week, the Facebook messaging app got an update that now includes an Apple Music bot that can recommend playlists and songs based on emoji. It’s a pretty straightforward rollout, as sending the bot an emoji gets you a selection of albums or playlists to match up.

So sending heart eyes tends to yield love songs, but either due to glitches or fear of crossing into a legal grey area, some emoji don’t work particularly well. In short, dropping a “poop pile” emoji won’t get you any Iggy Azalea, and an eggplant emoji probably won’t turn up Prince’s “Darling Nikki.”

For those types of selections, a good, old-fashioned text search works best. Simply type in genres, specific songs or albums and you’ll be presented with a batch of selections.

The kick here is to get you to shell out actual money for these songs by either purchasing them or subscribing to Apple Music. As such, you can’t use the new feature to listen to complete songs unless you’re a paying subscriber. Otherwise, you’re limited to 30-second clips of songs. But if you happen to be messaging someone and are either debating a song or have it on the tip of your tongue, the new feature could prove useful. Just ask a Spotify user, as the alternate music streaming platform has already been integrated into Facebook Messenger since the spring of 2017.