How To Use Spotify
Prelude
Is it pretentious to name a section after a music term? Absolutely.
Does pointing it out and owning up to it absolve me of that? No.
Shockingly, even point that out doesn’t.
In fact, you can prove that, as the series approaches infinite meta, the total pretense never decreases, but diverges.
How about that.
Aside from obnoxious jokes, I include this section because I think this whole post will make much more sense if you take a moment at the top to consider all the contexts in which you listen to music and the different types of music you may listen to for each.
Maybe you’re a loyalist and only listen to one type no matter what.
Maybe you’re an agent of chaos and will listen to anything while doing anything.
If I were doing this, I would think about the music I listen to while working or writing or coding.
I listen to different music depending on whether I’m juggling or driving alone or just listening to music or hosting a party or eating brunch.
Even if I know that I’m just planning to listen to music, I may be looking for music that matches or evokes a certain mood.
If you’re not me, you probably have different preferences.
Since Spotify is a music streaming service, when I talk about how to use Spotify, in actuality, I’m envisioning an omniscient, omnibenevolent DJ that always plays the perfect song and complaining that Spotify doesn’t achieve that impossible standard while simultaneously ignoring a lot of the features that get it close.
So if you were looking for serious advice, proceed at your own risk.
Here I will discuss my (far from perfect) attempt to approximate that very standard using (a semi-arbitrary subset of) Spotify’s reality-bound features (as well as one very possible feature, the nonexistence of which never ceases to boggle my mind).
DJ Desiderata
There are only two essential features of good DJs.
One is famous because it’s not obvious; the other is not famous because it’s obvious.
Famously, good DJs read the room and play songs that anticipate the crowd’s vibe.
(Underrated subpoint here: part of maintaining a vibe also involves not spending long thinking of what song to play).
Obviously, good DJs take requests.
DJs who don’t take requests are not bad DJs, they’re tyrants.
The same should be true of Spotify.
You should be able to listen both to songs you knew you wanted and to songs you didn’t know you wanted.
Spotify is pretty good about letting you listen to music you know you want to listen to.
If you just know what you want to listen to, good for you.
You can just search for it and add it to the queue.
Spotify is worse about letting you listen to music you didn’t know you wanted to listen to.
Granted, it’s a much harder problem.
Generally there are two reasons you don’t know what music you want to be listening to.
Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve listened to that music and it’s not top of mind.
If someone mentioned it or started playing it you would immediately recognize it as the right music for the moment, but you’ve forgotten its existence.
Perhaps you’ve never heard it before.
There’s probably a lot of music you would love to listen to that you just haven’t heard yet.
If you could just play that without knowing what it was beforehand, that would be ideal.
Another subgenre of this case is when you want to listen to music that sounds like music that you’ve never heard before (but is still inoffensive to your ears (preferably)): tricky.
We’ll take these in turns.
Exploration and Exploitation
This is the point in the show where I feel compelled to explain the trade-off between exploration and exploitation even though it’s completely unnecessary and everyone reading this already know exactly what I’m going to say just by reading those two words.
While I know of the concept of Exploration and Exploitation from Reinforcement Learning, presumably the terms come from conquerors in the wilderness looking for villages to plunder.
They’ve been out there for a while, so they know there are some villages along the river.
They could hang around that area.
Or they could explore.
They expect that most of the wilderness is filled only with vines to hack through and wild animals to attack them.
They can hunt, and they won’t die, but it will be less comfortable than staying by the river.
If they do find El Dorado, they’ll be able to Exploit that for much more than the river villages, but if they don’t, they can always return to the river, and they’ll be glad they went through all that trouble.
Even if they just find another river, that could be a success.
Now that they’ve found it, they can set up their teleporters and go back and forth instantaneously.
Hopefully now you’re wondering why I felt the need to go on such a tangent when it would have been clearer to just say: sometimes you might risk listening to music that you don’t like in order to find music that you like even more.
I don’t know!
While this obviously applies to new genres, I would say it can be applied to any music that you haven’t heard before.
The key is that, based on your previous experience and preferences, some new music is less risky than others.
Trying out a whole new genre may be like exploring the wilderness.
Less risky exploration, like a new album by your favorite artist, is more like exploring farther down the river.
Another explorer might have told you about a place they found that they thought you might like.
This is also pretty low risk, but it’s still a place you’ve never been before.
I have a favorable impression of Spotify’s tools for this kind of exploration although I hardly use them.
They generate playlists for different genres and for music that’s similar to music that you like.
If you like exploring, you can listen to them.
My preference is to use artists’ “Fans also like” lists to explore.
Maps
If you’re not a ridiculous imaginary explorer who just wanders out into the wilderness, you probably also want to keep a map to track where you’ve been.
Maps are a fantastic technology that you use to track places that aren’t in your immediate field of vision.
Not only do they help you get where you want to go, they can help you figure out where you might want to go.
In my mind, Spotify does a less awesome job at automatically creating maps.
They make attempts, but they haven’t quite gotten the right granularity.
To cover the near past, they have “Recently played” and “Jump back in”.
As the name suggests, “Recently played” covers the music you’ve played most recently, in order.
“Jump back in” is a bit a vaguer.
It seems to be the music you’ve played the most in the past month or two that’s not currently in your recently played.
To cover the distant past, Spotify autogenerates 100-song yearly playlists every December.
At least for me these are total messes.
I prefer to create seasonal playlists.
In my experience trying both, seasons better represent the period of switching up the music I mainly listen to, and if I create them myself, I can add music that made a strong impression on me even if I didn’t listen to it a lot.
This tradition actually started as a semesterly tradition where I would download the playlist after finals and listen to it on the flight home.
I’ve been putting off this section because when I’m done writing it I’ll have to reorganize all my playlists.
So I’ll try to write about how I envision my setup rather than its current state.
I try to create and maintain playlists that fulfill each of the requirements I’ve mentioned here.
During every season, I add the songs I listen to and like the most to a seasonal playlist as a map of places I’ve enjoyed going.
I recently created a “Listen Later” playlist: sort of like a to do list for songs.
If I hear about a song or album I want to listen to, but not right now, I’ll add it (or the first song of the album or most popular song by the artist) to Listen Later and probably eventually, I’ll get back to it when I’m in the mood for new music.
It makes it easier to explore and exploit when I want to.
Pretty straightforward.
I also try to create playlists for different contexts and moods that I usually find myself in.
When I get in the car, I don’t have to spend a long time queueing up songs; I can just put on In My Car.
If I’m trying to concentrate on, say, coding, I can pick an album from Concentration without waffling.
Playlists work fine for these uses, but have I mentioned how it boggles my mind that there’s no tagging system in Spotify?
This will shock you to hear, but some songs fit multiple contexts and moods.
There are some songs that are Instrumental and Happy and Socially Acceptable.
There are other songs that are Good For Singing To and Happy and Not Socially Acceptable (mostly show tunes in this category) and there’s no good way to play the overlap of all my Happy and Socially Acceptable songs without making a custom overlap playlist.
And one for every other possible overlap.
Who would design it like this?