The Art of the Spotify 'Mixtape'

It’s no secret that the mixtape is a defining aspect of life for a member of Generation X. If you’re like me, you made mixtapes for yourself and for people in your life you wanted to experience the joy of your musical knowledge. Sometimes the gift of a mixtape was purely platonic and other times (like for our friend Rob Gordon above) it was a declaration of love.

Of course, back in the day Rob (and I) had hundreds of CDs or albums in our collections and audio tape recorders and players were ubiquitous and standard for listening to music. Today this is no longer the case, and even if you still have CDs and a CD burner there is an assumption the recipient of your CD can actually play it. I don’t know about you, but I no longer even have a CD player at home and the one in my car has never actually been used. Enter, the music streaming service.

To be clear, I’m not going to get into the reasons why people love or hate streaming services or the quality of the sound for those of you who can’t get past the compression of music on these services. It is what it is. Today I pay a monthly fee to access Spotify at home and on my mobile and I’m happy being able to listen to whatever I want whenever I want. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is.

But if the upside of Spotify and the like is that you can listen to damn near the entire history of recorded music on demand, the downside is that Spotify’s algorithm doesn’t always deliver what you want to hear. The solution to the algorithm problem is the playlist. If you’re using the playlist feature correctly, the experience of listening to your music is greatly improved and it can function like a modern-day mixtape and all you have to do to “give” it to a friend or potential romantic partner is share the link. I love the playlist feature and use it in a variety of ways for different scenarios. I use Spotify, but I suspect the other streaming services have similar features.

My favorite playlist and the one I go back to over and over again is one I call The Best of the Best. I follow hundreds of artists on Spotify, but sometimes I don’t feel like picking a specific artist to listen to or a specific genre. When I’m in this kind of mood, I click on my Best of the Best playlist and hit shuffle. To create this list, I went through each artist I follow one by one and added my favorite song by each. This list is then made up of essentially my favorite songs of all time and I can always trust it to make me happy whenever I don’t feel like picking something specific to listen to. I chose to select my single favorite song by each artist, which is often not one of the artists big hits, so this playlist is 100 percent catered to me. It never lets me down.

One thing to note before I go on — in Spotify you can sort by title or artist or recently added — but you can also select shuffle or even “Mix” which creates a sort of deejay feel where your songs fade into one another. You can also select “smart shuffle” which plays the songs on your playlist plus songs the algorithm thinks you might want on the list. I do not use smart shuffle on the Best of the Best list because I only want to hear what I’ve selected to be on the list. For this next list, I use smart shuffle as a way to discover other songs I might want to add to the list.

The Spotify algorithm does create genre specific lists for you, but just because I like 70s rock doesn’t mean I like or want to hear every artist from in that genre. SO instead I create my own list for a specific genre and them use smart shuffle when I listen to it in case another song pops up in that genre I want to include on my list. Here’s a favorite genre-specific playlist I made that I call “Sophistipop” that I listen to often:

Finally, one of my favorite playlists to make are made up of songs or artists around a specific theme. I have one, for example, called 30 Under 30 made of of artists I like who are under 30 years old. I have another called Cover Me made up entirely of cover songs in which I like both the original artist and the cover artist. My list, my rules. And finally, perhaps my favorite playlist of all is the one I call Jews of Rock. This list was inspired by Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin created "The Hanukkah Sessions," a yearly project where they release eight music covers of famous Jewish artists for the eight nights of Hanukkah.

My list has its own set of rules that qualify it for the list. Obviously, there are solo artists who are Jewish that make the list such as Billy Joel, Lisa Loeb, Noah Kahan, and Leonard Cohen. Then there are bands made up entirely or mostly of Jewish artists, like Haim and The Ramones. The list includes bands where the lead singer is Jewish, like Counting Crows and Van Halen (David Lee Roth songs only). And then there are bands or artists with some members who are Jewish, like KISS and Rush. I try to be inclusive, but if the band has eight members and only the keyboardist is a member of the tribe they don’t make the list. Again, my list my rules. What is so fun about this list is finding out that artists you never knew were Jewish are in fact Hebrews — Mandy Moore is half Jewish and so is Pink. And Darryl Hall converted so Hall & Oates make the list!

The Spotify algorithm has no idea what to do with this list so I do not use smart shuffle.

The best thing about these playlists is that they can be publicly shared. I make most of my lists public so I can share them. If you like one of my lists, you can add it to your Spotify and if/when I make updates they’ll be reflected on your version. And if you have made some great playlists feel free to paste them in the comments or send them to me on Facebook or by email.

Have fun and happy listening.