April 11, 2024 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Esabella George
Tell Spotify to quit lurking and stop using big words they don’t know or understand. Stop calling my reclusive vibe “solitude 90s soft rock” when I just need a break for a moment. And, no, you’ve got it all wrong — I am not a “bitter dog” this evening or any evening. And despite my residing in Colorado Springs these past three years, I am not taking the bait and clicking on your recommended “angsty small town Saturday afternoon.”
What is it with these all lowercase titles, so trendy, so bizarre, so invasive?
But I also like it: you brought me the album “Bluffer’s guide to the flight deck,” similarly and strangely another lowercase-inclined title by Flotation Toy Warning. In some ways, it feels like Spotify just hired a cool new intern — one who is not just recycling the same old Spotify-prone absorbent songs we have all heard way too many times. And, I know, my assumption about a cool new intern is unsupported, but the way they casually just dropped these into the music libraries of all Spotify users’ playlists is something of a surprise, an intrusion, that I cannot look away from. And as an aside, I want to say, no, I am not actually angry about this, it is just for fun. I do want to point out how our subscriptions to media and entertainment can be a little bothersome and obnoxiously encroaching upon our habits.
I will be switching back and forth between this phenomenal band all thanks to the phenomenon that is Spotify’s daylist. To all of those off Spotify, in their post-Spotify era, or dependent on music from other sources (Emma Langas ‘25, I am talking to you, as she Googles how to transfer from Apple Music to Spotify for the sole purpose of daylists), Spotify began curating three playlists a day for their members, dropping a new unique title at highly specific hours and minutes of the day. For example, right now, my very next update is at 3:12 p.m. on this fine solar eclipse Monday afternoon. When the clock strikes 3:12 p.m., I hardly notice, but for the sake of writing this, I will let you know what playlist I receive.
As a personal opinion regarding this new feature on Spotify, I fear this new change will only bring forward even lazier listening habits, causing magnitudes of music spontaneity to disappear, as listeners only need to hit shuffle. In Spotify’s proposed attempt to prescribe your listening mood to you at that moment of the day, will this algorithm become another danger to our genuine analog of music? Are we all just becoming curated by what Spotify likes, disguising itself as the demand of our habits? Will there be increasing variety in listeners, or are we all just slowly being shown the same sample tracks for a specific mood, cosigning onto Spotify’s empire of declaring trending music, preventing authentic, individual discovery of music?
On the other hand, I know I felt something different after Flotation Toy Warning showed up on one of my daylists, for it was one of the few times I have actually allowed the laziness of music listening to get to me, and I thought I’ll just find something new and not produce the tough work on myself of needing to memorize lyrics. New music calls for relaxation in some ways, and that is what happened with this spectacular daylist. It changed my attitude toward the whole thing and made me appreciate the algorithm for once, yet, that was stolen from me. I realized then, after finally giving it some attention, that this turned-cruel, but cool new intern decided to refresh the brilliant work, making the data remain tragically unsaved.
Here is where the dilemma is presented to us: this new feature carries the quirky desecrating burden that the playlist will be untraceable once that clock strikes. I find it ironic that we have no way of recovering an old daylist unless we screenshot it, and the one time I was thankful, it was ripped away from me.
Perhaps daylists aren’t just working against us–they completely miss the internal habits of music listening, miscalculating our needs at the very least, and everything sort of feels like a parody. Despite her infamous familial legacy that is the company Mr. Christmas, Maddy Meister ’25 expressed that the daylist title “enlightened religious music Tuesday morning” did not fully appeal to her tastes but was certainly intriguing, almost nailing a guess about Meister. Is this all happenstance, or so we think?
Everything just feels a little silly about the whole thing, hence, the cool new Spotify intern that I imagine is pulling all of our legs, leaving me wondering how many of these playlist names there are. I feel generalized in a sea of genres where I have never been a fan of genre-specific listening; song titles like “Fire engine on fire part i” and “Fire engine on fire part ii” have not found their way onto one of my daylists, almost seven minute long songs, but their neighboring track from “Bluffer’s guide to the flight deck,” called “Made from tiny boxes” is a more digestible alternative, flung into the abyss that is my irreplaceable, favorite, now-gone daylist.
Unrecoverable, I ponder “what is absence?” Now Spotify has caused me to develop a sense of longing I hadn’t had before. Now, because of Spotify, I’ve earned myself a “confused longing trying to recover something that was perfect now gone” titled playlist (I’m being so dramatic).
3:13 Update: “bitter fuzzy monday afternoon” just dropped, and according to my history of listening to apparently “dreamy” and “vegan” (what the hell does it mean to listen to “vegan?”) on afternoons like this one (Monday is their evidence), they’ve gifted me an undeniably new assortment of music, although lots of repeats from recent album discoveries I have made yet have not given a full listen to the album in order.
I guess I am developing an evolving appreciation for this method, or am I growing lazy? But, then, they’ve nicknamed my Monday afternoons fuzzy, and this does not appropriately capture the sentiment of panic I have been feeling lately, to the point where now I am analyzing whether “fuzzy” means blankety and warm, or if it is confusion, blurring feelings where music may just be the right answer I am seeking.
Spotify has gifted me some “cheerleading, bitter, crunchy, birds, cat, and gritty” tracks, and that is all they have to say for themselves on this fuzzy afternoon that I can expect to unfold; while I have some questions, I have this allusive Spotify intern to say thanks to for music ranging from Spaceships to Space Rock to growing somber, sad guitar afternoons. Will Spotify manipulate our own ability to dictate what the present emotion and feeling we experience at that moment is, with this inclination to prescribe our afternoons, mornings, and nights as isolating, or tender, or even “audiophilic?”