In the music blog Aurgasm, the songs in the posts play one after another. Play one and when it’s over the next will start. It’s a blog but it’s also a playlist.
Also, it’s good. It’s just plainly obviously not lame.
And then there’s this Robert Radish playlist about rock songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland. It has an idea behind it. It has artwork. It has a ton of explanatory text. It has a recognizable human presence. It has a social existence in the form of comments.
It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s pretty cool in its own way. The page is full of color and life and it’s fun to think about all those songs being influenced by Alice in Wonderland.
Jeremy Schlossberg is a pretty decent writer. Here’s a piece he did ragging on shared playlists. It’s mainly self indulgent sport typing but towards the end he has some thought provoking words.
lovely article. so much of music corporate culture depends on the water-cooler-sharing experience of mobs of buyers. what if music were shared
one track at a time, among small groups, even in little parlor settings?
i personally never want to listen to anyone’s playlist, but i love to get a single song to hear.
At best, like mixtapes, playlists are about self-expression… I agree that a single song with a context is WAY more compelling than a playlist lacking context. Mixtapes have always been about process, not product. Some music blogs capture this and some do not. Elbo.ws, for instance, does not. It is more like those crappy pseudo-mixtapes clothing stores sometimes give away free with purchases.
But there are two meanings of playlist, I believe, and one of these is often occluded in the cotext of online sharing a la Lala etc. When I was first involved in campus radio years ago, I was annoyed that the station supplied a playlist because this seemed “corporate” – but then I realized that the playlist was maintained by a community whose concern was to make sure that artists meeting the station’s mandate didn’t get overlooked.
Again, this was process, not product.
IMHO, publishing a “playlist” as an act of canonization is MUCH more important than as an act of “sharing” – I think there is something to be lost in conflating the two ideas.