The Playlist That Knows Your Mood Has Already Decided What Music Is For
Mood playlists can keep people company and introduce them to work they would never have found.
Spotify introduced daylist as a playlist that changes with the time and the kinds of music a person tends to play then. It is an intelligent response to how music already fits into a day. The volume I want under a conversation is different from the volume I want alone. The peculiar idea is that having a more exact description of the situation means knowing more about what music ought to happen in it. Spotify’s introduction to daylist.
I might put on a record because I am tired and discover it requires something closer to concentration. A strange sound makes me stop a job I wanted to finish. A song that appeared to support my mood brings a memory into the room I had been successfully avoiding. These are bad outcomes for the job I gave the music in the first minute. They can be excellent outcomes for my relationship with the work.
When a useful category overstays
Mood is a legitimate way into a recording. A DJ reading a room is doing it in public. The difference I care about is between a category that helps people arrive and one that sets a limit on which changes can occur after they get there. A DJ can play something the floor initially misunderstands, hold their nerve, and watch the room become a different audience. The change can be part of the achievement. A recommendation system has to make a kind of decision about when that change looks like success.
The listener has responsibilities too. I may take the invitation to use music as a surface for everything else I am doing. That can be kind to the music. Some records were made for company and hold their detail beautifully at conversation level. The habit feels costly when I assume resistance is a fault in the recording, before I have asked what kind of attention it was built to meet.
Thinking about the endless precision of playlist names makes me want a less accurate name for what I am doing when I listen. “Getting ready to go out” can describe the first part of an evening. After a demanding record, I may not want to go out. It would be a loss to get better and better at finding music that could never do that to me.