Use Your Friends’ Packed Spotify Lists for Your Own Personal Gain
Since I foolishly decided to use Amazon Music with my Alexa smart speaker (because it’s cheaper, and certainly not because it’s better), I can only watch with envy as my friends share their annual Spotify Wrapped summaries that offer a whole host of interesting data about the songs they’ve listened to in the last 12 months: top hits, day’s top hits, top genres, and more. But even without my own Spotify story to put up for public condemnation (ask me to share an account with someone who listens to a lot of Katy Perry Chipettes ), I can benefit from my friends data. in a bunch of ways – including as a roadmap for exploring the genres of music I hate.
I got this idea from my friend Megan , whose social media personality is steeped in gothic; I’ve never met her in person, but I’m pretty sure that if I did, she would emerge from a blackened cloud in crisp white makeup, supported by majestic bat wings and carrying a sword of human bones. Suffice it to say that she’s not the kind that comes to mind when I hear the words “dance pop.” However, the other day, she tweeted:
In subsequent tweets, she embarks on a real journey exploring the effects of “Cut to the Feeling” by Carly Rae Jepsen, a fantastic yet clearly not gothic song that I love that she encountered in the sealed song summary. also dressed in black is a mutual friend of ours who nevertheless knows a good beat when he hears it. Megan’s attitude towards sunny dance tunes quickly went from awe to a ” bewildered cocker spaniel “, well, well:
It was then that it occurred to me that this experiment would be fair for any friends with whom you might not share common musical tastes. Supposedly you care about these people, so maybe it means something they like, say, country music (to pick a genre that is often criticized: “I like all kinds of music except …”), and you will understand better after listening to exactly the songs that they like.
You cannot access someone’s summary resume unless they share it with you, even if you subscribe to it on the service . Considering this topic has been trending on social media all week , you probably won’t have to ask twice (or at all) – and you can always visit their profiles on Spotify itself to see which artists they’ve played recently. It’s not quite as good as a list of the best of the year, but it can still be a reliable source of musical inspiration.
So why not dig through the end-of-the-year roundups of other people you trust to see which unusual songs they liked so much that they could have been repeated several hundred times in the past 12 months? Unless they’re a parent whose child messed up their listening history (or Lifehacker technical editor David Murphy , whose wrapped resume is full of soothing ambient music he puts on to sleep), you’re sure to discover some gems. … In the worst case, your own judgments about what is bad music will only be borne out, and who doesn’t love a decidedly cocky music lover?