A few weeks ago, I accidentally discovered that the Spotify 'Liked Songs' list does not allow you to custom sort, which is a baffling limitation. The most recent song you liked appears at the top, and as I scrolled — visually searching for the name of an album I was craving — I remembered feeling like this before, in a time before streaming, when hoarding GBs of music was a hobby and organizing that music library was a lifestyle. Now, our access to music is nearly unlimited, as is the metadata to sort it, and still my experience with the music library is a mess.
Music libraries are not immune to the entropic nature of the universe, the unlimited, ever growing nature of that library aiding its own chaos. I'm also not a power user of the Spotify platform (or any platform, honestly), which means I don't seek other ways to navigate or organize my experience outside of what I'm already used to, i.e. hitting the heart icon when a cool song comes on, or occasionally saving someone else's playlists to my library. The day my younger sister showed me how to make playlist folders in the desktop app, my mind was blown, although I was never compelled to make more than a handful. Born in 1994, my sister skews toward the last of the millennials, and despite us being born in the same defined generation, her usage of certain products and platforms are blatantly superior to my own.
I consider my interaction with Spotify to be a side effect of having lived through the heyday of peer-to-peer. I have a tendency to latch on to albums and listen to them all the way through, a habit that was no doubt formed in adolescence, at a time when downloading, organizing, and fawning over entire discographies was a part of shaping your identity. I rely heavily on my 'recent search' list to remind me of recommendations from outside sources, i.e. word-of-mouth, music blogs, algorithms beyond Spotify’s. I use ‘Liked Songs’ as a running list of songs, albums, and artists to follow up on.
Meaning was cultivated partly through the effort of organizing, by tending to our own musical gardens. Weirdly, in scrolling through my Liked Songs list, I feel a similar way.
In the early 2000s when downloading music was novel, the experience of listening was layered with symbols that influenced the context of how you remembered the music — how you acquired the media, if the song names were correct, if the album art was accurate. Meaning was cultivated partly through the effort of organizing, by tending to our own musical gardens. Weirdly, in scrolling through my Liked Songs list, I feel a similar way. The inability to sort forces wildly different artists next to each other (Turnstile and the New York Philharmonic, Kiefer and Sturgill Simpson), which has a way of jogging the memory. I am reminded of when I was sad based on a string of liked songs in a row, just like when I was on a salsa kick last year, and a proceeding disco kick after that. The symbols of this mode of listening are enhanced by being chronological. For me, this turns out to be a significant emotional marker.
But despite the perceived nostalgia, Spotify the platform, and streaming in general, has effected the habits of my consumption. In 2015, I saved alt-J's An Awesome Wave, making it the first full album on my Liked Songs list. In scrolling forward to the present day, the songs saved are almost entirely complete albums until 2018, when an Alvvays song "Dreams Tonite" appears between the beginning and end of two other albums. I know the song was found on a Spotify-made playlist, I remember skipping backward so I could save it, I remember the blue, orange and red of the album cover catching my eye. The Alvvays song marks the moment when I started saving more individual songs out of the context of their albums. In this realization I am not alone, as noted in a recent Guardian article:
Conversations around how digital marketplaces shape listening have long focused on the unbundling of the album. For some, though, this has felt distinctly tied to streaming. Nick Krawczeniuk, a music fan and network engineer who recently moved away from streaming, felt his listening habits were being particular affected by Spotify’s “liked songs” playlist: “I found myself selecting more and more just one-off songs from an artist, whereas before I’d been inclined to save a whole album.”
Like the result of technology, there is no reverting backward with music streaming, and the decision to change listening habits or platforms residues only with the individual user (I have personally been trying to figure out if I’m willing to take the leap for about a year.) Maybe my sis is onto something with her playlist folders. By creating a method of organization, she defines some meaning in an increasingly passive listening space, a task that doesn't get any more 'sign of the times.'
— caro.
Listening to:
The album that got me scrolling through Liked Songs in the first place. A word-of-mouth rec, btw:
Reading:
This Is What It Sounds Like, still, and this T. C Boyle fiction piece in The New Yorker in print, on the subway. Who am I?