My Spotify playlists are all but arbitrary. Like any other listing on the app’s Browse section, it tends to swing willy-nilly depending on my mood, circumstance, or nostalgic fixation. One of the saddest playlists I have in there acts like a graveyard: a bunch of songs from my old CD “mixtapes” (I named it “Old Jamz” to signify its juvenile content) — casualties of my Marie Kondo cleanup — that had Ben Jelen, CSS, Brian McFadden, and Nerina Pallot. They almost never get played, unless I’m feeling wistful. Like old-school mixtapes, playlists like these are now home to music that I once loved, shrouded by an air of nostalgia that amplifies a specific point in my life. I find CDs and DVDs almost as archaic as cassette tapes now. Although when I pass by record bars, in an unusual turn of technological trends, I head straight to the crate of vinyl records (or maybe it’s just my preference for tito rock) than the racks of CDs.
In today’s game of algorithm-based streaming, it’s only the popular ones that get picked. According to my Spotify Year in Music, I listened to 32,000 minutes of music this year — that’s 22 days’ worth of pop, indie rock, and teen pop. For the entire year, I listened mostly to One Direction and James Reid. The song I listened to most was Up by Olly Murrs and Demi Lovato (I blame that one long-ass bus ride where I listened to the song for the entire duration of the trip). The non-pop choices were few and far between, which makes me think that I use Spotify purely for pop music purposes. I would like to think there’s more to my musical preferences than what Spotify’s formula suggests. My Discover Weekly playlist, recommendations based on my Spotify listening habits, is mostly of songs I tend to skip anyway.
The exclusion of physical objects, such as magazines, CDs, and record stores, in an increasingly digital world has an effect on our musical choices. Even with the ascent of iPod to our permanent sonic soundscapes, magazines such as Spin, NME, and Rolling Stone are still arbiters of taste, whittling down millions of songs to essentials that you should be paying attention to. Instead of listening booths and display cases trumpeting album recommendations, we now have websites and streaming apps that herald new music just a tap away. These albums and singles, though, are pushed to the back, buried among the binary detritus the Internet churns out every second. Apple Music and other platforms have tried to remedy this by hiring actual people to curate playlists to tide over the overwhelming information available, but we have yet to see if these tastemakers are just trendsetting power players or life-changing decision makers.
The New York Times columnist Teddy Wayne recently discussed the importance of the material presence of cultural markers such as books and albums for future generations. A house with shelves lined with literary greats or musical geniuses, he noted, has a profound impact on a child’s academic and cultural upbringing.
“Consider the difference between listening to music digitally versus on a record player or CD,” Wayne wrote. “On the former, you’re more likely to download or stream only the singles you want to hear from an album. The latter requires enough of an investment — of acquiring it, but also of energy in playing it — that you stand a better chance of committing and listening to the entire album. If I’d merely clicked on the first MP3 track of “Sgt. Pepper’s” rather than removed the record from its sleeve, placed it in the phonograph and carefully set the needle over it, I may have become distracted and clicked elsewhere long before the B-side Lovely Rita played.”
Though I never bought a CD of Neutral Milk Hotel or Death Cab for Cutie, listening to their albums still hinge on an intimate connection since I discovered them after reading my favorite music magazine. The point of music discovery is its personal impact. You’re more likely to feel emotionally attached to a record you discovered flipping through the record store than something predetermined by codes.
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Neutral Milk Hotel's In the?Aeroplane Over the Sea was one of my musical discoveries,?through a music magazine, prior to the era of algorithm-based recommendations.