My Spotify playlists, let me show you them

this is my very incoherent Brazilian music playlist. Although kind of shows how diverse BR music can be. and I guess most of them are not the typical 'rough guide' tracks

https://open.spotify.com/user/shinsuzuki/playlist/1KScB7My1yefWMBvRypx7R

My loosely defined 'balaeric' playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/millmeister/playlist/2w659opjEdfQ2EsniyA1xy

xp will check the Brazilian playslist. Looks good!

so when i'm playing my video game on the ps4 i will just pick some random playlist to listen to. i will try to find ones with tons of songs and ones that aren't like 8 tracks from the same album one after the other and i usually always listen to bass/electronic/house/techno/rap because electronic stuff just sounds the best in the canned airless universe that is spotify. perlon and kompakt stuff is tops on there.

anyway, is there a name for the phenomena where long seemingly random playlists of genre stuff all start to sound....not the same...but weirdly okay even if its stuff you wouldn't buy/listen to on your own or even if its stuff you thought you didn't like? maybe that makes no sense. i think i remember this when cable t.v. started adding tons of genre digital radio stations. and maybe it is the effect of compressed digital streaming or something. i was listening to a 700 song rap playlist last night and it all sounded fine whether it was classic stuff or stuff i have liked for years or stuff i'd never heard or stuff i just don't need a lot of. nas and biggie and mobb deep and big noyd and 50 cent and paris and xzibit were playing and it didn't really matter who it was it all blended together and so much of really doesn't blend together in any other setting. it was't wallpaper or muzak...but just there. nothing popped out. even D12 sounded fine next to a tribe called quest and i don't really go out of my way to listen to D12. it all ended up feeling like its on the same level.

i don't know. maybe i'm crazy. or maybe i don't listen to really well-made mixes/playlists. i just get this flattening feeling. i guess its the same as that satellite radio feeling.

there are algorithms that rate specific qualities of sound, bpm, dynamics, etc to create similarity rankings among songs. it's possible that playlist is the result of using one of those.

that must be it. i listened to a microhouse playlist last night where everything sounded pretty distinct - within the confines of spotify sound - and different tracks did stand out, etc.

i am not a long-time user of the service...

I am happy to take algorithmic credit for this.

(But it's pretty unlikely that's the explanation. The acoustic analysis is usually much better at eliminating acoustic outliers than it is at producing subjective consistency. And unless the playlist is personalized or one of mine like The Sound/Pulse/Edge of X, it was probably just made by a person anyway.)

Hi Glenn, I have a nitpicky Spotify issue that you might be able to address. For no discernible reason, the discography of Magma (the 70s prog one) is divided into two separate artist pages, both called "Magma." This seems like it should be pretty easy to consolidate into one page, yes? A similar issue exists for Sun Ra with his various Arkestras, though that situation is better than it used to be.

anyway, is there a name for the phenomena where long seemingly random playlists of genre stuff all start to sound....not the same...but weirdly okay even if its stuff you wouldn't buy/listen to on your own or even if its stuff you thought you didn't like?

i think this is how most people listen to music. last year i was a couple nights into an annual float trip with my high school buddies in MO. per tradition, we went to one of those post-apocalyptic campsites by a river where there are dozens of separate groups, some families, some loud teenz, unpaid budweiser endorsers who connected their pickup trucks, rear bumper to rear bumper, so they could put a ping pong table up on the combined beds. it was no use trying to sleep until the campsite calmed down around 2-3am, so lots of people just drunkenly stumbled from one group of cars and tents to another. some real hunter s thompson shit. anyway, i don't know why i'm bringing all that up except that in those situations, touring lots of different social groups, most of whom were blasting music...i don't know where i'm going with this, sorry. i think at some point i was going to pivot back to our own campsite, where even 3/4 out of our minds on various substances we were carefully curating the upcoming tracks on our playlist, and how unusual and wrong it seemed. i don't know. there are plenty of people who feel an urgent need to control the stereo on a road trip, or will let the imperfect soundtrack to a house party ruin their evening. but for the most part, i think people are just happy to hear randomly selected tracks from a genre they know decently well enough to recognize a song every once in a while.

It's easy to get all pop-Frederic Jameson but there must be some sort of reification of the flattening of affect with regards to streaming - both in terms of tonal quality and, concomitantly, emotional response. Like, equalisation automatically flattens everything to some degree, but shuffling also always seems to cause everything to blend together. It's like blancmange. I get a kind of shuffle-fatigue from it

If people could pick unique artist names, it would be really helpful. I'll see if I can get Magma cleaned up...

Thanks, Glenn.

"It's easy to get all pop-Frederic Jameson"

ha, yeah, or c&p passages from trow's context thing all day long. but! "The trivial is raised up to power. The powerful is lowered toward the trivial."

or in the case of the massively addictive and endless miami bass playlist i was listening to the other day: "the trivial is raised up to the bottom. the powerful is lowered toward the booty."

"I get a kind of shuffle-fatigue from it"

i get ear-fatigue. and sonic claustrophobia. i can only take an hour or two max of spotify. which is also what happened to me with digital radio years ago. but doesn't happen to me with youtube for some reason. maybe the wildly different sound sources of youtube have something to do with that. i have no idea.

karl's story is wild and i like it and taps into something i think about a lot

" maybe the wildly different sound sources of youtube have something to do with that. i have no idea"

I suspect it's something to do with this, plus the use of YouTube is so much more, I don't know, kinetic (by degrees, of course). There's something too seamless about Spotify, something that encourages the kind of claustrophobia you mention.

I like Karl's story, and kind of wish I was there. My more suburban, middle-class version of that is how dinner parties (not as poncey as that sounds, hopefully) and how playlist curation has become something like a parlour game, where the selecting of the song is everything, and where the listening comes a distant second.

how playlist curation has become something like a parlour game, where the selecting of the song is everything, and where the listening comes a distant second.

sadly otm and I'm very much part of this myself, wish I could just let it go like Karl in that story

rather than carefully constructing playlists, I like to take the approach of designing my own personal radio station. I like to have very large playlists filled with a lot of full albums. I'm pretty liberal about throwing stuff that seems interesting onto a playlist, rather than trying to find the perfect song or set of songs. This allows me to throw a playlist on shuffle and be constantly surprised by what comes up. If there are things I notice I'm consistently skipping, I remove them.

i listened to the best Paradise Garage playlist last night. had the best stuff on it. all the garage favorites and lesser-known Levan nuggets. of course after an hour or so i just listened to the first 5 or 10 seconds of about 50 tracks. but even that was fun. freebasing basslines.

I just keep a list of 2194 songs that I like and play it on random all the time.

^
gets it

yeah, but you aren't going to have 700 garage-era dance tracks on there. sometimes i'm in the mood. and i only listen while playing R:DM for PS4 anyway.

DJs or clubs as a focus for spotify playlists are the best

Optimo 250: https://open.spotify.com/user/alex_tea/playlist/1Qrvz1kdf2VJUO0Wjt6ROw

Am I correct that one can make playlists available online in the 'my music' section if it's for iphone/ipad, but for the desktop app you need to make a playlist of the album and then make said playlist available offline? :-/

sorry wrong thread

really the answer is just to listen to new music. sounds cool. new rap especially. its made for it. i forget that sometimes. i don't listen to a ton of new music but listening to a new rap playlist on spotify is totally addictive. plus, now i am a big kodak black fan.

This isn't mine, but dayum it's good: all the originals of songs covered by This Mortal Coil: https://open.spotify.com/user/p.mitchell2/playlist/7rpK9fGA7IhVtxwvZSDJBg

I've spent the last year or so somewhat systematically going through the discographies of loads and loads of bands, including some genres I hadn't previously felt too knowledgable about. Album by album, artist by artist, decade by decade I slowly deleted all filler tracks and/or songs I just didn't like. II created a library of folders and broke them up by decade, genre, and artist. When Spotify allowed you to shuffle folders this made for a bunch of great radio-like playlists. The all-genres decade playlists I thought were especially great because they jumped around so much they felt like the radio but were more interesting than your typical algorithm-generated Pandora station. And, to my ears, the flow was strong because it was just curated enough as to be better than mere discography dumps. No sax solos, no skits, no weird studio outtakes or rando live bonus tracks.

Then Spotify killed the folder functionality which ruined the ease of my system. But lemons, lemonade: I made giant playlists so I could still shuffle, which means they are now shareable. Here are the first three:

1960s
1970s
1980s

These are all massive playlists - 3,000-4,000 songs. And they'll continue to grow. There are probably some glaring omissions in each (either due to my dislike or I just haven't gotten through them yet). But as they are I think they're still a nice "radio" alternative if you're so inclined. I'll share the later decades once I've finished making them.

Looking forward to checking these out.

You can still shuffle folders from the desktop app. I start up my big folder on desktop then switch to phone. A bit of a pain, but works.

Yeah but I only use desktop at work, unfortunately. So that won't work for home/commute.

I made this for summer get togethers. Hit shuffle and have fun for four hours.

A Summer Cook-Out Playlist For Grown-Ass People

count me in

it's a good playlist

I enjoyed that, ty

Thanks y'all

I was gonna make a freaks & geeks playlist but there was already one (many, actually) so this is not mine but all the same very enjoyable
https://open.spotify.com/user/yoongym/playlist/50UHZcO2MbfwBCtDo4iGq9

must be a matter of time before a wealth of great compilations (like those Rhino Power Pop for instance) turn up as playlists

ministry of sound sued spotify over playlists that mimicked their comps and settled out of court.. so unless the label themselves make the playlist i'd expect you won't see them

really? wonder if my playlist would get removed if I did one featuring all the available tracks from the Have a Nice Day 70s compilations...

depends on how many followers it gets i'd imagine :)

Ministry of Sound sued and won? That's ridiculous.

it didn't go to court but presumably spotify paid them something in the settlement

but does that mean you can own the idea of a playlist and its contents? that is kiiiinda weird

I know a lot of work went into constructing compilations, but, well, not anymore! Also I'd imagine labels and artist still get payed if "copycat" playlists are played, but perhaps ministry of sound didn't own the tracks they were distributing outside of that specific compilation context?

This almost goes back to that crazy argument mattresslessness tried to put make, that ILXors have no right to pillage ILX lists for Spotify use.

Are you cool with forks making Spotify playlists out of every rolling thread without permission?

I mean, Capitol doesn't have the Beatles VI on Spotify. Could someone really raise a fuss if I put all those songs together in order so I could hear one of their best American albums?

yes! particularly if you call it "Beatles IV"!

uh i mean VI

But -- I'm not selling or profiting from it? I'm not taking away any profits from it? The songs are all there, just not in that particular order?

I mean, sure I couldn't use the album cover for copyright reasons, but ... really?

Beatles VI
https://open.spotify.com/user/gojiramonk888/playlist/7tMN4K6z4vF0PoGLFUNQvo
https://open.spotify.com/user/mrotch1212/playlist/67s74xUxPLgEoaEhmtUZIq

omg, they're gonna get sued by Michael Jackson.

here's an enjoyable listen
https://open.spotify.com/user/12126891385/playlist/2E8LN1v4QTt0hepoGjr40z