A Different Way to Use Playlists
People create playlists for a variety of reasons: to capture memories, evoke a mood, support an activity like studying or working out, or help others find new music. In this post, I’m going to introduce an approach that does something a little different. It’s called expressive playlisting and it’s a method of curation that transforms your relationship to music by helping you actively develop your own preferences as a listener.
In this post I introduce the approach, provide an example of what it looks like in practice, and explore its four interrelated aspects. In future posts I will demonstrate how to do it.
In a Nutshell
Expressive playlisting involves noticing when you feel pulled by songs and using playlists to group these songs together so that you can begin to differentiate and name the specific qualities that draw you as a listener.
These qualities are implicit in your experience of music and come into clarity through the playlist creation process. By the end of it they become a “thing” that you can be aware of. You now know you love the quality, the way you may know you love, say Swedish pop or Southern hip-hop. The quality that you’re drawn to now exists alongside those as “things one can seek out” in music. You’ve brought it into the world as a kind of genre existing alongside other genres and it’s become something you can deliberately listen for. This feeds back into your experience of music, transforming it. In essence, you’re teaching yourself how to listen to music in your own way.
This approach to curation emphasizes process over outcome. The main goal is not to make a great playlist; it’s to use playlist-making as method for awakening to what you are drawn to in music. The playlist becomes a tool for explicating and evolving your own musical preferences.
That’s pretty abstract. Here’s a concrete example:
Example
Forward is a playlist that emerged through the process described above. It evokes a quality that is at once youthful, nostalgic, bold and poignant. It’s about looking ahead to the future and back to the past simultaneously—that kind of feeling we get at a crossroads in life like graduating high school or moving into our own place for the first time. Musically, it has an exuberant, forward-looking optimism I associate with the pop culture of the 1980s, (although all the songs are new).
Each song has a propulsive bassline that, again, drives you “forward” before releasing in an explosive chorus. All these thematic strands are woven together in the cover art for the playlist. One of the earliest songs in this playlist—Tennis Club by Talltale—helped me discover this theme by expressing this quality in such a concentrated way over the course of three minutes that I couldn’t miss it.
Until I created the playlist, I wasn’t aware that I responded to this quality in music and I couldn’t hear it in any kind of consistent way. It didn’t yet exist as an entity I could orient to. Now that I’ve named it, it’s become a “thing” for me, such that I can spot this quality when I hear it in music. If others enjoy this musical theme, they could turn to me for a steady stream of such songs.
Note that “Forward” is not an already existing genre, so for the right listener I’m offering something potentially more valuable and unique than just another pop playlist. I think of this as a “personal microgenre” and I imagine a future in which many of us are creating these microgenres to actualize latent aspects of songs that have yet to be widely recognized. Aspects that we, as individual listeners, are uniquely able to notice, resonate with, and bring forward for others to appreciate.
Benefits of this Approach
There are four aspects of expressive playlisting that I want to highlight here:
1. Enjoying Music More
In this approach, the playlist is as much for you as it is for other people. And what it does for you is deepen your appreciation of the music that draws you. It enables you to encounter these songs more fully, and to experience more enjoyment from them than you’d be able to without the playlist.
This is possible because the amount of enjoyment to be had from a given song is not a function of the song itself—it’s a function of the relationship between you and the song. And that relationship is changed by altering the context in which you experience the song.
Playlist curation is essentially a process of context-creation. That is, when you make a playlist, you are creating a new context for the songs within it, and this slightly alters your relationship to these songs. A comparable phenomenon might be experiencing your romantic partner differently when you’re together around other people like co-workers, family and friends. Have you ever had this experience? Sometimes you appreciate your partner freshly in these moments as different facets of them come forward while you watch them interact with others in these novel social contexts. You notice new things about them and it deepens your affection for their way of being.
Relating this back to music: changing the context in which you encounter a song, by putting it in a playlist, extends and deepens your capacity to appreciate what is there in the song. The inherent specialness of the song—for you—is brought forth more fully and can be savored anew. The song becomes less disposable, less likely to be passed by. What there is to love about the song becomes foregrounded. It does this for you, and potentially also for others, which leads to the next point.
2. Venerating Beauty
Expressive playlisting enables artists’ songs to be presented in a way that brings out the best in the song for other listeners. It celebrates the work of artists and shows it off in a loving way. It highlights something that is special about the song, making it easier for others to notice this and increasing appreciation of the song overall.
Again, by functioning as a context, the playlist brings out certain latent aspects of songs that might otherwise go overlooked. These qualities of the song become foregrounded and easier to notice, and then savor. In this sense, playlist curation becomes like good music criticism—it makes it easier for us to appreciate what is there in the music.
Another important point related to the one above: expressive playlisting makes it possible for songs to get a new lease on life. They are never exhausted, as there are always new aspects to notice. Maybe you’ve had this experience in this past: you’ve played a favorite song of yours to death over the years, but you’re making a mix for a friend and you’re listening to the song again as you consider adding it. As you listen, you imagine your friend hearing it and how they will feel. Through this exercise in perspective-taking you are creating a new context in terms of which to receive this overly familiar song. Now, hearing the song through the ears of your friend, you hear it freshly again. It somehow arouses new feelings of pleasure and delight, despite having been heard hundreds of times before.
I believe you are hearing the song in a new way and that this experience is possible because of something philosophers call “aspect-perception.”
Whenever we see something, we see it as something. This is called an “aspect.”
Changing the context in which you encounter something allows surprising new aspects of it to come forth for you. What it is for you, is in some sense changed by this.
For example: what is this object?
You might see it as at least three different things, depending on the context. If you encountered it on a kitchen table next to a knife and fork, you’d see it as a “spoon.” If you saw someone using it to slide into a pair of loafers, you’d see it as a “shoehorn.” If you came across it in the backyard next to a garden claw and gloves, you’d probably see it as a “trowel.”
Connecting this back to music: I have the song Run Your Mouth by The Marias in two different playlists. When I listen to it in one playlist, my attention is drawn to the bright, percussive sound design–it becomes an instance of a musical quality I’ve discovered I love that I call Crisp. When I listen to the same song in the playlist Snap, it’s rhythm and arrangement are highlighted and I’m able to connect with a “swagger” quality of the song that I find exhilarating. Both of these aspects are implicit in the song for me, and the playlists help me orient to, and savor, these dimensions of the song by making them explicit. I can now appreciate them the way a wine-taster is able to appreciate different notes in a Cabernet.
Songs don’t have to get old—more can be heard in them, extending the life of the song and overcoming the seemingly disposable quality of so much (including music) nowadays. This is good for music as a whole, for listeners, and also for artists whose songs can be streamed more and more as people discover new facets to appreciate with each listen.
3. Connecting with Yourself
In addition to increasing your enjoyment of music and showcasing songs in a way that brings out their intrinsic beauty, expressive playlisting can be a practice of self-discovery. The activity of music listening becomes progressively more self-expressive over time as you engage in this practice. Another way of saying this is that more of you comes to be revealed in the playlists and in what you listen to. Your unique way of engaging with music becomes elaborated through the curation process and this will be reflected in changes in the family of playlists over time as they become differentiated and higher order groupings or meta-themes emerge.
An example in my own case is the meta-theme of “something coming toward you” or “expanding into your space” which shows up slightly differently in the playlists Audacious and Numinous. It’s as if there is some figure, or motif, at the core of who I am that is being reflected back to me in these songs. I’m oddly drawn to this relentless, “coming toward” or “expanding” quality–and this movement is expressed with slight variation in each of these playlists.
This motif seems to be transmodal. When I look at what I’m drawn to in other domains, like writing or film, I see the same themes showing up again: a preference for the “in your face” playwriting style of David Mamet, and the confrontational filmmaking style of Martin Scorsese, for example. It’s almost like the things we’re drawn to are mirrors reflecting back something about our essential style as an individual. Expressive playlisting is about awakening to these motifs by sustaining focus on what draws us in music and elaborating this through the playlist creation process.
Over time, my library of playlists has become more distinct, and more “like me.” Put another way, I, as an individual soul, have become more fully expressed through it. I might tell people: if you want to know me superficially, look at my job, where I live, or other details of my biography; if you want to know me more fundamentally, look at my playlists.
4. Developing a Personal Listening Style
The highly personal and self-expressive nature of this type of playlist curation gives rise to the fourth aspect: the cultivation of a Personal Listening Style, which is the unique value you can offer to others as a curator. As this becomes developed over time, the thing you offer become less interchangeable with other curators, and hence potentially more valuable.
To the extent that you become aware of your listening style and can articulate it to others, you make it easier for others to find a taste match with you and make use of your work. A statement of personal listening style could even accompany playlists so that listeners could quickly determine whether its worth investing time in the playlists, given their own preferences.
To emphasize: there are things that you are here to hear—particular musical themes that others will not be drawn to spontaneously and may not even be able to notice on their own. The songs depend on you to notice and bring attention to their distinct qualities in order for others to appreciate them.
Summary
Expressive playlist curation is a process-oriented approach to playlist making that is transformative in a several ways. It increases your capacity for enjoying music, it enables you to potentially play a vitalizing role in the music promotion process, it facilitates self-expression, and it allows you to put this self in service to others by using your personal listening style to bring unique value to other listeners who turn to your playlists for music discovery, as well as the artists whose music you are showcasing.
Last Updated on March 27, 2025
