Our Playlist Culture
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By Jacob Davis
It was Christmas day. I was in the living room of my parent’s place in Prince Edward County with my grandfather, and, unsurprisingly, we were talking about music. One of my gifts had been three records: Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, Dean Blunt’s Black Metal, and the live Townes Van Zandt record, Live at The Old Quarter, Houston, Texas. I don’t, however, own a record player. I have no easy way to listen to these records, but I nonetheless have easy access to these albums. Our conversation stemmed from my previous reflections on the album in the age of streaming platforms. Like all forms of communication, music functions as a means of expression and, of course, consumption. The artist may create their work for themselves, but, if they want to achieve success or acclaim, they ought to make their art palatable to their intended audience. We got to talking about this interplay and the existence of mediators in the process. He mentioned prior mediators: labels, record stores, and critics as serving large roles in his past consumption of music. This led us to discuss not only music listening today, but also our current mediators. Labels, critics, and record stores all still exist, but none hold the influence over the music scene they once seemingly held; today, our predominant mediator for music listening are algorithms. I mentioned my feeling that in the age of streaming platforms, the album as a form of expression functions less as a cohesive whole and more as disjointed individual tracks. Many albums today are full of good songs, but lack any real coherent theme, narrative, atmosphere, etc. to tie the project together. It almost feels like they were being built to be broken down. It was here that the idea first came to me; our culture is kinda playlist-y.
Once I got to thinking about it, I realized the analogy really wasn’t just about music; a playlist culture is a metaphor for a society inundated by content where people cannot handle nor understand their state of overwhelm, and turn to surface level engagement to maintain feelings of comfort and security. This applies – with different, if overlapping effects – to both the art world and the information sector. In the music realm, information overload is essentially taken for granted, which is why recommender systems are so useful to listeners; they provide a passive means of listening. In the information sector, I believe that overload is acknowledged by all, if not consciously; it is built into a world of totalizing access. I’d like to draw a distinction between what I describe as “information overload” and “information overwhelm.” Overload refers to the sheer excess of information available; it does so using language that seemingly likens the phenomenon to a mechanical problem. In contrast, overwhelm reflects the feelings that accompany the reality of information overload–the experience. We all may experience overwhelm in our overabundant age, but how we experience it is often intimately connected to how we understand the technologies that facilitate our access to information. Accepting overwhelm in an era of information glut is a difficult challenge, especially when it is so easy and comfortable to passively consume (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 68). Our relationship to music, and to information more generally, reflect this difficulty of accepting the unknown and the ease of passive consumption. Much of this challenge stems from the significant influence of the recommender systems that platforms use to deliver the content we consume, and our relative ignorance towards these processes.
Despite the profound impact that algorithms have on our lives, we often consider their extensive effects, purposes, and structures quite uncritically. Algorithms operate through processes of sorting and segmenting individuals’ habits and preferences in an effort to predict the interests of consumers. In effect, they predominantly function to maintain and increase consumption. Through attempting to captivate the user and increase engagement, these systems can end up reifying the preferences of their users. A notable instance of this phenomenon is with Spotify's Discovery Mode, which often functions to accommodate the listener’s established tastes rather than to expand them. Part of what makes these potential echo chambers so seductive and so dangerous is our relative ignorance of how algorithms work. Nick Seaver notes how people often see algorithms as practically mystical, with powers far beyond what they are actually capable of. Such ignorance undermines critical thinking about how algorithms function and how they are controlled. Seaver points to the fact that the companies behind algorithms are shaping said algorithms; so much of what we see as simply the effects of the “mystical” algorithm are actually the effects of people often attempting to increase our consumption. Algorithms are constantly adapting to keep up with current tastes and values. In her article How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm Tiffany Ng discusses her findings that artists could have a hit song without the rest of their discography receiving any attention at all. A preference for singles is not new, but the dynamic changes when one has access to the catalogue of the artist whose song they love and still do not explore further.
There is an interesting and unanswered question: Does our expansive access to artist’s catalogues, along with increases in the quantity of music listened to, mean that we actually listen to more complete albums? In the past, when music was sold physically, people listened to their limited catalogues in their entirety. So what happens today when our catalogues are unlimited and untethered? This is the paradox of the digital age which reflects the impacts of our playlist culture. Seeing our current relationship with art as a playlist culture is a useful tool for exploring our struggles to adapt to oversaturation. The reality that music today is often consumed as individual tracks divorced from their albums and created similarly reflects our playlist culture. As noted, a preference for individual tracks is not new, but what is new, and what makes this so intriguing, is the effortless access we now have to the catalogues of the artists. The album was originally a segmentation of tracks into a project that could be sold as a collective; now that the prominent means of listening to music is through streaming platforms, we have the easy ability to break down the album. It is unsurprising that the rise of a playlist culture in the music world seems to directly coincide with the rise of streaming platforms.
My interest in contemporary communication in art is rooted in my pandemic experience. I’ve always loved music, and, during the pandemic, with far too much time on my hands, I tried to broaden my tastes extensively. I got into a wealth of new artists, albums and genres that I loved. I found platforms where I could find new music, apps where I could download that music, and sites that could track my listening. This variety seemed at the time to be quite admirable. Over time, however, I became concerned about my appreciation for the music I was listening to, particularly given my difficulties contextualizing the works I was enjoying. Because I was listening to so much music in so many different styles, I began to see myself as knowledgeable about the music in a way I wasn't, especially given my limited understanding of the genres I was listening to. I also noticed a strange dichotomy I was subconsciously drawing between “playlist tracks” and “album tracks.” Even now as I try to delve deeper into single genres as a means of coming to understand the context and purpose of the art, I feel I only acquire a limited understanding of where the music I love comes from. It’s not a lack of access, perhaps it’s even an issue of too much access, but it often feels like simply an issue of time.
The feeling of having too little time on your hands is a significant feature of a playlist culture. Given our near boundless access to music, users can listen to whole projects, yet often seem to turn to the accessibility of individual tracks and playlists. Why listen to an album with songs you don’t like if you can just put the songs you do like on a playlist? This logic, however, seemingly eliminates the need for the album, favoring the accessible and self-indulgent playlist. This is less true in the world of independent and underground artists whose work is more focused on the project as a whole; nonetheless, these artists still need to accommodate the structures of algorithms if they want to gain prominence on streaming platforms. Listeners often become more passively dependent on algorithms to provide them with music, while artists have become more focused on creating content that will succeed in said algorithms. In the era of streaming platforms, it has never been easier for artists to release music, and Ng notes that many artists release music quickly and consistently to keep up with ever-changing algorithms–essentially trading depth for recognition in their projects. The common result is a culture that takes what they want from an artist and leaves the rest behind without much consideration–a playlist culture. As noted, this analogy is not only helpful for examining our relationship to music, but for considering our relationship to information glut more broadly.
One can certainly see aspects of playlist culture preceding the rise of streaming platforms. You could argue that it is connected to television, and others may suggest it only truly took shape during the rise of the internet, but McLuhan saw it as coinciding with the rise of the “electric age.” While our metaphors are different, we seem to be discussing the same concerns: in a world of information overwhelm, there is a risk that our understanding of topics will be subconsciously reduced (Understanding Media, 64). Comprehending the entirety of an individual concept or a specialized role through reductive pattern recognition is inevitably impossible. This is what McLuhan means when stating: “The more information one has to evaluate, the less one knows” (The Global Village, 129). We run the risk of losing our sense of nuance, leaving us in a state of close-mindedness. Even within our own beliefs we frequently fail to consider the depths and complexities of our narratives and convictions. Information overwhelm breeds feelings of uncertainty and insecurity which in turn lead to people’s frequent embrace of dogmatism in an effort to sustain security through certainty. Given our total reliance on algorithms to provide us with content, our relationship to information can become quite passive; we take what we see as reaffirming our positions and leave the rest behind offering it little thought, just like people tend to do when selecting songs for a playlist.
Information overwhelm seems to inherently lead to reduction as we cannot contain, comprehend, or consume the entirety of the world, or most individual topics. We tend to trade depth for efficiency by reducing complex ideas, be them social, political, or artistic, into forms easy to comprehend as we are endlessly bombarded by newer and newer content. As algorithms are designed to keep the user engaged, their function tends to rely on providing users with content that reinforces their political, social, and cultural perspectives. This is what Neil Postman is discussing when reflecting on the consequences of infotainment and the screen. We develop our perspectives through communal values, though as we become more untethered in our digital age, this process is influenced much more by online sources; that perspective then gets reinforced by recommender systems which keep us docile, and leave the information we consume reductive. This is not to suggest that information overwhelm necessitates close-mindedness, only to note that extensive access can have dangerous consequences if we are unaware of its effects.
A playlist culture is a helpful metaphor to examine how people engage with news today; even within a piece that contains a diversity of views, one can find nuggets to further their own certainty without considering context. Much of this can be attributed to our cognitive biases, which I believe are uniquely exacerbated in our era of access and overwhelm. We now have a wealth of information accessible that provides the opportunity to question our preconceived notions; these beliefs, however, are often sustained and reinforced through our efforts to maintain certainty in an era of ambiguity. Complexity, nuance, and most importantly ambiguity are frequently lost in a playlist culture. Certainty not only appears to contribute to our reductive engagement with new information, particularly from conflicting perspectives, but seems to undermine our capacity to engage openly with those we disagree with. For productive discourse to take place, accepting ambiguity and uncertainty are a necessity, for without that sense of insecurity there is no room, nor reason to learn about the positions we disagree with and to develop a deeper, more complex understanding of those perspectives and their contexts.
When people on the left think about conservative advocates today, they primarily think of people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, or Matt Walsh rather than people like Patrick Deneen, or David French. In our age of infotainment, dogmatism and exaggeration are far more appealing and available to the average consumer than more nuanced perspectives; excess plays far better than nuance in our algorithmic world. As such, critics of conservatives and other social and political movements frequently have reductive conceptions of the positions they oppose. Matt Walsh is a good example of how dogmatic content can reinforce the positions of those who agree with something they consume and those who do not. Walsh is a pseudo-documentarian who begins his projects with a narrative that he tries to reaffirm through his "documentary” interviews. All projects will inevitably reflect the biases of their creator, but what makes Walsh notable is his openness; he wears his dogmatism proudly on his sleeve. He may call his movie What is a Woman? but he is not actually curious about the answer. He just wants to maintain his position of certainty and moral righteousness. There is no reason to engage with a figure like Walsh, but when “the left” comes to see him as an accurate representation the conservative movement, they risk reaffirming or establishing their certainty that conservatives = bad and they = good. Likewise, if supporters of anti-trans legislation are exposed to the “gender debate” through sources like Walsh’s, they will see “the left" in an entirely inaccurate and reductive manner. Ideological certainty not only undermines open-minded discourse, it eliminates the need for it. Dogmatism has plagued humanity throughout history, but it is worth examining how our current age of information overwhelm has affected how it manifests. In the state of overwhelm and uncertainty that information overload brings, dogmatism offers a safe and secure alternative from the insecurities of ambiguity and the acceptance of overwhelm.
While the (narrative surrounding the) ubiquity of algorithms can seem quite dystopic at times, it can be helpful to consider McLuhan himself when he says, “There is no inevitability, however, where there is a willingness to pay attention” (The Global Village, 12). In our digital world, we have become so overwhelmed by information that it seems inevitable that we will engage with issues in surface level ways, especially given algorithms’ role to increase consumption and their capacity to create echo chambers. Nonetheless, it is overly pessimistic and unproductive to suggest we have no power at all in the world of algorithms, online platforms, and vast access. Escaping the potential risks of a playlist culture requires us to increase our critical awareness of the algorithms themselves, of our consumptive habits, and of the interplay between the two. Our playlist culture is a reflection of our current state of information overwhelm and our struggle to come to terms with it. Accepting the reality of our overwhelm and exploring where it derives from and what it can cause may allow us the means to become more open-minded, more adventurous, and more curious. By accepting uncertainty and our own limitations in the current age of information overwhelm, we have the opportunity to constantly develop, grow, and learn.
Coda
A few days ago I sent this piece to my grandfather to see what he thought about it. In his response, he mentioned the mixtapes he used to make on cassette, noting the difficulties involved then that no longer exist today: the physical nature of the creation process and the inevitable degradation of the tape. As the music world has moved more online, we have become entirely untethered from the physical world when making playlists, as our access becomes unlimited and online. Likewise, the idea of music deterioration becomes a fear of the past, as digital music files do not degrade over time. There are extensive benefits that have come with these digital developments that cannot and should not be denied. Nonetheless, the effects that digital innovations bring are not purely additive. Postman described our relationship with technology as analogous to a Faustian bargain (The End of Education, 41, 192). A playlist culture reflects this tradeoff; we have increased the ease, access, and efficiency of our world remarkably, but what have we lost in the process? A Faustian bargain may seem to imply that this technological tradeoff is permanent and unchanging, but it is likely not. McLuhan uses the term somnambulism to describe the individual unaware of the effects of the media their world is created by (Understanding Media, 40). We can, and must strive to awaken ourselves and others from our somnambulist state if we want to avoid the dangerous and alluring temptations of passive, uncritical engagement.
Jacob Davis was raised in Toronto, Ontario, and has an undergraduate degree in sociology from Queen's University. If you have any comments, questions, concerns, or any other thoughts on the piece, you can reach him at jacob.davis40@gmail.com.
Works Cited
McLuhan, Marshall & Bruce Powers. 1992. The Global Village: Transformation in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. Oxford University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2003. Understanding Media (Critical Edition). Gingko Press Inc.
Ng, Tiffany. 2024. “How to Break Free of Spotify’s Algorithm.” MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/16/1096276/spotify-algorithms-music-discovery-ux/
Pleasants, Jacob. 2023. “A Conversation with Nick Seaver, Author of Computing Taste.” Civics of Technology. https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/a-conversation-with-nick-seaver-author-of-computing-taste
Postman, Neil. 1986. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Penguin Books.
Postman, Neil. 1995. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. Alfred A. Knopf.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.