Why I Oppose Music Playlists

It seems that since 2016, there’s been very few articles and little data on the statistical usage of playlists as a primary source of music consumption. Notably, Spotify is very frugal with the distribution of their listener’s habits, but I think a lot can be drawn from the UI changes of streaming platforms in recent years. It’s quite hard for my eye not to be immediately drawn to a selection of brightly decorated squares with ‘Discover Weekly’, ‘Spotify DJ’, or ‘Daily Mix xyz’. There isn’t necessarily a problem with these being presented to me - it makes sense, I suppose I should go listen to more of what I was listening to - but it has me thinking more widely about the impact of playlists on the act of listening, and whether there is something lost in that?

My position, to begin with, is that I dislike playlists - I think because I don’t understand them. Since I was small, I was always used to owning music in the form of CDs, often sourced cheap from charity shops or Poundland (of all places, yes they used to sell them!). I think since then, I've always been an avid album listener - a habit taken from my family’s own habits. Even when I was gifted an iPod Nano - a tiny little square music player - I was still conscious of listening to albums and loading on all of my music from my ripped CD library. If anything was digital, it had its origins in something physical. I don’t think much of my listening has carried through into adulthood, but I'm sure whatever I did listen to helped form my listening habits today.

Nowadays playlists outweigh albums for the majority of listeners, an understandable statistic given the rise of streaming services. But what are the consequences? It is not uncommon now to see an artist promote a new album through a monthly release of singles, culminating in at least half (if not all) of an album’s tracks being available before a full scale physical launch. In some ways the advantage is clear, draw in your listener while the physical copies are manufactured, culminating an audience before release. On the other hand, it speaks volumes about the need for artists to manufacture their music for the algorithm, all to attract a wider audience. I think this has a much more worrying implication: if a playlist encourages similar listening, by appeasing its listener, it cuts out a huge variety of music that instead seeks to challenge a listening ear. I worry then that playlists, while offering thousands of songs, potentially leave you listening to what is essentially the same type of music over and over. It puts your listening in a box and risks leaving you disengaged.

So as an album devotee, how do I use playlists? Well - I like to think of them primarily as mix tapes - which in turn I think are their own love language. There is a certain romantic appeal (at least for me) in the challenge of curating a mixtape for a friend. To start, you have the consideration of the person and their listening habits, then which songs you feel reflect an artist’s discography authentically, and then further to that - the actual challenge of making the songs flow in a meaningful order. There is a conscious thought and dedication to the practice. You have to be measured and conscientious in your approach, and I think for many pre-streaming era generations, this may have been a fantastic method of discovery. Maybe you remember someone by a song they gave you, maybe that song reminds you of them? Maybe you shudder from the song… I suppose there is a drawback too.

My other use is distinctly unromantic, it’s to collate/organise songs from a production level. It gives me fast access to particular sounds, textures, or songwriting techniques that I like or look to draw upon - a sort of inspiration manual if you like. These playlists I'll mark with ‘REF’ and then follow it with an associated context, for example: ‘REF Building Songs’ for songs that start small and grow big. So, this approach is more a more objective use for playlists - it’s just cataloguing, but also speaks of my treatment of the ‘format’. To me, they are just folders for songs. Perhaps that too is negligent to the songs, reducing them in some way by throwing them into a room of similar tracks. It’d be like meeting many copies of yourself - I’m not sure I'd like that.

Returning to mix tapes briefly, this idea of ‘flow’ or continuity between songs is something that artists themselves pore over when finishing an album. The order of the track listing can be a painful process, from discerning what will be the opener and closer of an album, and then deciding what kind of journey the listener’s ear will go on in between. Flow is incredibly important as it determines the emotional momentum of an album. Sometimes you may want a rocker to counteract a ballad, perhaps starkly, or maybe you’d like to front load the album with more energetic tracks before leaning into the more nuanced, challenging songs. The idea of being ‘challenged’ to listen is incredibly important for albums - most of my favourite artists have always pulled me in with singles (as they are often designed that way), but have left me more enamoured with the weightier, less immediate tracks that don’t make their appeal so clear on first listen.

I’ll admit - the only time I have ever used the ‘skip/do not play’ function on Spotify is on Father John Misty’s more recent Mahashmashana, on the track ‘Screamland’. In a way, I hate this feature because it is an extension of my own avoidance for a song that I dislike. The trouble is - I’ve tried with this track, and for me it just feels very disparate compared to the rest of the album. It’s a very overdramatic, over compressed, pop-style track that stands apart from the eloquence of its surrounding songs. I realise - if I owned the vinyl, this would open side B - so would I strategically place the needle, or maybe I'd prefer side A? Alternately, would this song sound the way it does if it were only available on a vinyl? My cynicism here stems from my assumption that the track was designed to sell the album, probably through playlists. I remember speaking to a colleague at the studio I was working at upon the album’s release, he was much more of a fan than me, and his thinking was that the song is a necessary pop epic to widen Misty’s audience. I’m not sure I can agree. For me it pushes me away from the album. I suppose if it were a vinyl, I’d have to strategically key in a scratch to make it jump the track. I am mostly joking, such a thought makes me shiver… if you love ‘Screamland’, then I'm sorry for my slander!

Another confession - I haven’t used this feature just once - I’m sorry. In fact I remembered while typing this paragraph that I also used it on Wilco’s critically acclaimed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, on the track ‘Radio Cure’. I admit - I remembered while typing the previous paragraph, so treat this as cheap shock value. I found ‘Radio Cure’ mawkish at first, I wanted to like it but its disparate composition left me struggling to find a way in. I can say that since, I appreciate the song more - it’s still my least favourite on the album, but I can now enjoy the song’s eventual payoff in its final two minutes. In the end, I got past my fear of that dreaded ‘skip’ button, mainly because I felt a guilt I was doing the album a disservice as I became more invested in it. There is an irony here, because the album’s publishing was fraught for its lack of commercial appeal, eventually being published under another label, but one which was also owned by Warner. So I too, am a little complicit in its dismissal. Since release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is considered Wilco’s masterpiece. So I wonder, would this album be received well if it came out today? What if it was released song by song and then dropped into discovery playlists? It’s an album filled with unusual songwriting techniques, cut up sounds, samples, and other oddities that make it so unique. So I suppose my questioning is whether I would find this album as fulfilling via a playlist, and would I risk dismissing the album if I had only heard ‘Radio Cure’? In contrast, playlists are organic, mutable things - albums are not. I’ve owned REM’s Automatic for the People since I was twelve years of age, but it took me another decade to actually engage with it. Maybe that’s not the speedy response that Spotify wants from its users.

So is it now the role of the artist to write music that appeals to the playlist format? Is there now a greater calling for each song to be a single, and if not - is that artist expected to suffer less of an audience for it? I fear it cuts out a good deal of indie artists, or relies upon them to manage a much smaller, but more invested fanbase. Of course streaming services are not the be all and end all of audience discovery, especially when the payment to artists is so low, but it does seem to place further odds against artists that don’t appeal to the algorithm. This is all my own supposition - maybe this method actually caters for a wider breadth of listeners, and if you’re old school like me - well you can also get by.

I do still believe the album format is sacred, if I like one track, I then make it my objective to like the next, and another, and another… until I like the whole album. If not, I'll try another album by that artist, to see if my way in can be found elsewhere. I enjoy being challenged in my listening, but of course I don’t like everything I hear. I don’t tend to engage with pop for example. I think that’s fine - that’s just my taste and I listen as I wish, but how would an algorithm accommodate for that? A lot of my artists I discover retrospectively, going via critical praise on magazine websites, and that makes me wonder - how do I find an artist that is new? It seems my ‘newest’ listening is discovered through Youtube Radio Shows, like KEXP. Not Spotify. Tiny Desk is another wonderful example - it’s about the artist, in the purest form, but should discovering music be that boutique? I fear I'm now making a shopping list of questions that can’t really be answered.

So maybe the album and playlist can co-exist for me. Maybe the album should come first, and enable the creation of a playlist. I have a shared playlist with a friend - where we both contribute songs we feel one another may enjoy - it’s convenient and over one year has reached around 150+ songs. With that, I have definitely discovered new songs and artists I enjoy. So there’s an argument in defence of playlists, you just need to find the use. However, these songs have only stayed with me if their associated album maintained my expectations. So, maybe then the album is still the anchor that dictates the appeal of my listening. On the flip side, playlists are wonderful time capsules for your listening habits - whether those be university party lists, or collations of specific songs that provide nostalgia for a time or place.

So to conclude, I wonder whether I can find a way to engage with playlists with the same interest as albums, at least for me. For many others, they may find the album format harder to engage with than the playlist. An album requires attention, and an hour or so of your time, a playlist can be functional - I can compose it for a run, or a party. Maybe they are two separate beasts, not to be compared.