At a time when people have access to millions of tracks at their fingertips through streaming platforms like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, it can be overwhelming to find new and relevant music.
Recommendations can only go so far. The YouTube algorithm does an excellent job where it considers a lot of factors like listening history, skips and view time, to name a few, to personalize your experience.
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I remember one time I was on a call with my mum, and we were talking about how I used to sing a Spanish song as a kid. And guess what! That song comes in as my recommendation the next day. That is some mind-boggling coincidence that I don’t even want to think about. I do not know how many data privacy rules have been broken but people like the concept of personalization, so there you go.
Discovering new music and artists has often come for me through people and radio. I have discovered budding artists that nobody has heard about on someone’s mixtape. Mood, genre, period are usually the show stealers when it comes to picking subjects to curate playlists. I like to create playlists based on my mood as it often reflects how I am feeling.
I think creating playlists is an art. My playlists often have a storyline attached to them and each song is handpicked. I remember the first time I heard a song and the euphoric feeling it sent me through, making me pull out my phone to Shazam what song it was. Music has this transitional ability to let you travel in time and space into a different version of you. I have seen this often with people who are close to me — they get lost recounting their memories and there is this undeniable sparkle in their eyes.
What better way to feel connected to someone than to show them your music collection and co-mingle in your weirdness – especially those guilty pleasures you often hide away and listen to by yourself for fear of judgment. It is a way of saying what you want to say with words that aren’t your own because it is hard to convey how you feel sometimes.
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I think you can say a lot about a person by what’s on their playlist. It’s a window to the emotions a person can feel. People listening to the same playlist can find it comforting to know that somebody else somewhere feels the same way. There is this unspoken sense of belonging.
To all the weird ones out there, who like to collect music like me and prefer playlists over recommendations, I leave you with this song: “Bluebird” by Lucas Fogale. “So maybe you're a bluebird, darling,” he sings. You are a rarity – don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
Sanjana Jairam (she/her) is a first-year graduate student studying data science.
