Today, I woke up to a recommended playlist entitled “baroque pop twee thursday morning.” This playlist, which featured Brian Eno, The Velvet Underground, and Belle and Sebestian, among others, did in fact encapsulate what my Tuesday mornings sound like. But while they got the artists right, what my playlists don’t usually have is a four-fold word description that bobs from subgenre to subgenre creating the most pretentious and insufferable playlist name you’ve ever heard. Being a music snob is fine, but at least don’t call the playlists I make “shoegaze neo-psychedelia sunday morning.”
Over the past summer, whether it be with their AI DJ or their increased targeting of their own playlists at listeners who match the demographic of the music they are pushing, Spotify’s developers seems to be leaning into our self-obsession. They don’t just give us our “Spotify Wrapped,” where they hold up a mirror to our listening data and tell us our top five. The new “daylist” now constantly checks in on us, reminding us who we are by showing us what we listen to. I am “cathartic emotional sunday night,” but I am also “empowering confidence monday afternoon,” and sometimes even the dreaded “alternative hipster afternoon.”
These playlists further splinter subgenres and the distinctions of music niches into entirely individuated pockets of personalization, giving the listener exactly what they already listen to, making sure that with the playlist description, the listener knows this is wholly theirs and no one else’s. “Dream shoegaze wednesday night” is me and just me. As I listen to “warm 2020s tuesday afternoon” writing this, I think I understand what Spotify’s “daylist” plays at.
We listen to music to understand our emotions, to feel something, to accentuate our current action, to romanticize, and above all, to generally enrich our lives. “Daylist” maps your days for you. The playlists seem to know you better than you know yourself, anticipating that you feel emotional on a Monday evening, or that you listen to bubblegum pop on Fridays. You don’t even need to decide what you want to choose to listen to anymore because daylist tells you what you will choose. As much as this nichification shows each listener a wide scope of themselves, highlighted by the wildly different playlist names they’ll see on daylist in a week, it mostly just reveals how predictable we are. Spotify’s attempt at examining the self through these playlist seems not to point to the broad range of music one can listen to from morning until evening, but rather, tells you how much the algorithm has you pinned down, to a point where we no longer are choosing.
On their website, Spotify describes this new playlist as “a new, one-of-a-kind playlist on Spotify [that] ebbs and flows with unique vibes, bringing together the niche music and microgenres you usually listen to during particular moments in the day or on specific days of the week.” It is meant to show users their unique daily listening, how many different genres they listen to, or what a unique blend of music they put together, but instead this algorithm limits the creativity it intends to exemplify. In Spotify’s increasingly niche algorithm, we are continuously filtered into smaller and smaller subcategories of music to listen to, meaning eventually we end up without any distinction between the things we like or dislike: We are in an echo chamber of music the app knows we will enjoy. We are being pushed to listen to artists which sound like or fit into “indie chill sweater weather wednesday morning,” constantly presented with more similar sounds that fit into the exact niches we already inhabit, allowing us to stay in a state of constant comfortability in the music we are exposed to. These playlist titles are a narcissistic reflection, and simultaneously a condemnation for us to cycle through the same songs over and over again. Spotify adds, “It’s hyper-personalized, dynamic, and playful as it reflects what you want to be listening to right now” and what you will be listening to for the foreseeable future.
Often, digital media gets flack for the filter bubble it creates, allowing people to stay in news cycles, fashion trends, and the media at large with which they feel the most comfortable. “Daylist” exemplifies this criticism by allowing users to have music that is palatable and perfect for their daily moods without even having to choose between albums, bands, songs, playlists, genres, or any sort of distinguishing quality beyond pressing play on a playlist.
The beauty of listening to music lies in the dynamic nature of the experience: what decade, what genre, what subgenre, what artist, what song; how singular it feels, how untraceable. I revel in the many subgenres Spotify has pinned to me, but I simultaneously feel disappointed at how easy it is to be put into a literal echo chamber of songs I’ve known and love over and over again. Music is discovery and distinguishing like and dislike is a key part of this process. Spotify is too good at its job: We are only given music we like. It already has filtered out that which would be abrasive to our ears.
Being put into a box by a playlist dissipates this illusion of choice for me. Much like TikTok fashion cycles of coastal cowgirl or blokette core, we are being marketed these niche trends by algorithms which have collected data and narrowed our view of their digital world to items they already know we will like. We think we created or found these niches, but in reality, the algorithm both birthed and brought up these trends through disseminating the right content to the people with a media footprint that matched up with that content.
While I love that something knows me as well as my daylist does, I kind of wish it wasn’t such a well-oiled machine. I’m getting all the spoils with none of the toil. I didn’t work to curate the mixes I’m listening to, and for that it’s somehow less sweet.
This isn’t a condemnation of Spotify’s algorithm or its attempts to give you more music you love, but rather an invitation to seek out something new for yourself. All these wordy niches are created from descriptions that were made to relate the innovation that we’ve created. Keep the algorithm guessing and listen to some songs that aren’t automatically put into your liked songs. Listen to daylist, or, if you so dare, listen to a new album at a new time of day, put on something that wasn’t marketed at you and see how it feels to peek outside the rabbit hole of an algorithm-dominated world that’s so good at what it does, we didn’t even notice it wasn’t us.
Having said that, “bubblegrunge chrunchy tuesday night” sounds perfect right now.
Mia Foster can be reached at mrfoster@wesleyan.edu.