Stop Using Playlists to Look Cool and Start Using Them to Share Your Feelings
Is it difficult for you to express yourself in words? Consider turning to one universal language that we all share: emo playlists. I believe that we, as a society , are wasting our time trying to showcase “aesthetic” musical tastes. Instead, we should spend more time creating emotionally charged and hyperspecific playlists. Moreover, we need to overcome our fear of looking corny and start creating these playlists with our friends, families, lovers, enemies, and any other special person who knows how to use the collaboration feature on Spotify.
What makes a playlist “good”
I’m tired of pretending that playlists are for something other than transporting me to childhood memories, tragic breakups, and epic reunions (real or imagined). For me, a good playlist could be twenty different acoustic covers of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well”. It took fifteen minutes to write this paragraph because I had to pause and close my eyes over and over again to feel the full emotional impact of this bridge.
While Spotify’s “ mixing” feature is great for finding your common tastes in music, don’t get hung up on the special intent of manually collaborating on a playlist. Shared memories can be revealed through song. Also, I don’t care if my Spotify Wrapped looks cool; I lost this battle the year I ended up in the top 0.1% of Lin Manuel Miranda’s listeners.
I’m not alone in my case for an emotional playlist together: science is on my side. Music is a tool for spreading “emotional contagion”, which Psychology Today calls one of the ways in which simply perceiving an emotion through music can evoke the same emotions in the listener. With this knowledge, it will be logical for you to create a shared playlist that will amaze your loved ones with strong emotions.
Music brings people together
Music has the unique ability to bond us, and it doesn’t stop just because someone is not with you personally. In an article for WIRED, journalist Amy Pathurel wrote about the power of a collaborative playlist to connect her family to her late father. To start the playlist, Paturel asked her family members two questions: “What songs remind you of your father?” and “Do you have a specific memory associated with each song on your list?”
As part of her research, Paturel spoke with anthropologist and Boston University professor Luke Glovatzky , who explained how “music affects the emotional center of the brain and is closely related to memory.” If you hear a piece of music, you can evoke emotion, an effect that you had at other times in your life when you heard it. It’s an instant sensory response, as opposed to spoken language. ” Patel also cites research like this one published in American Psychology , which states that “music serves as a powerful tool for strengthening social bonds, even when people are at a distance from each other.” Simply put, music brings people together.
Tips to improve your playlist
Let’s go on a trip. Specifically, let’s take a flight, as per this advice from Bobby Carter, producer of NPR Tiny Desk, on how to structure your playlists like a flight:
Generally speaking, an airplane takes off, remains a little in the air, and then descends smoothly. This is the arc you want to build your playlist around. Think about the role each song plays on your list, and from there it will be easy for you to dot and connect the dots. This structure can also help inspire more songs to be selected, as your musical brain will start inserting different songs in different places.
I want to focus on a little tip about how each song on your list plays a role. The next time you’re going to call a playlist “mood” or “atmosphere,” I suggest that you actually articulate the mood or atmosphere. Nostalgia? Yearning? Unrequited love? (No, I am not going through anything, why are you asking)?
My idea is to come up with a theme or leading question for your playlist (eg, “Which Paturel song reminds you of your dad?”). Here are some super obvious ideas to get you thinking:
- get into a time machine and hug yourself as a child
- discovering the love of your life was right in front of you all along
- stick your hand out the window during a cross-country ride in a stolen car with an unlikely group of heroes who are all your closest friends
- If you don’t play these songs at my funeral, I’ll come back to haunt you
- the moment you realized that your parents were also handicapped and that people cannot be expected to be perfect
- this grief is fictional, but our feelings are real
- pre-game jams
Again, these are just some of the ideas that crossed my mind. Ultimately, a shared playlist is for communicating with your loved one and unlocking memories specific to you. So start this text thread and get ready for a roller coaster of emotions. Because this is definitely and objectively the essence of music.
How to start collaborating on your playlist
Unlike the algorithmic ” mix” function, creating a collaborative playlist requires you to manually select songs. Collaboration is available on a number of streaming services. Here are Spotify’s instructions for creating a collaborative playlist:
- Select the playlist you want to collaborate on (keep in mind that you can only do this for playlists you own).
- Click the Add User button in the header to match the playlist.
- Start inviting others to add songs and podcast episodes on social media, messaging apps, or simply by copying and pasting the link.
And finally, one final tip for those of you who are still preoccupied with looking cool: stick to lowercase playlist titles. For some reason, teens are doing such a carefully chosen carelessness and we have to trust our teens, because if we don’t trust our teens, how will we know when we cringe?
Enjoy your listening and more importantly, happy feelings.