I feel like I can curate it better than an algorithm or some music critic.” -Aaron Padoshek “In a sense is just being my own DJ, curating my own library. Today the line between lists made by man and machine are blurring, with Spotify recently announcing that its mood-based editorial playlists would be personalized based on individual users’ listening habits. Eventually user playlists were eclipsed by Spotify’s editorially curated lists, like RapCaviar, and its algorithmically driven ones, like Discover Weekly. But these lists were originally of the non-automated variety, and were largely built by users. The service was built around playlists from the start you couldn’t even save entire albums to your personal library until April 2014. The mix of familiarity and freshness that a great smart playlist provides has over time become Spotify’s core value proposition. “I was just doing it long before that even existed.” “It’s kind of like doing the work of a streaming algorithm playlist manually,” Padoshek says. He’s meticulously rated most of the songs on the iTunes five-star scale, and tagged many of them with attributes such as mood, tempo, or subgenre so he can mix and match them in different smart playlists. Aaron Padoshek, a 35-year-old software developer who lives in Seattle, has amassed 10,000 songs via a mixture of legal purchases and piracy (though he says he’s now reformed) since first downloading iTunes in 2002. ![]() Smart playlists were both the solution to the problem of owning too many songs and an incentive to keep dumping more tracks into your library. I was a huge fan of 101.5 KPOD, which utilized play counts, star ratings, and nested playlists to create a pseudo-Top 40 radio station that mixed your personal library’s greatest hits with brand-new music. Entire online communities sprouted up in the mid-2000s around iTunes users trading their favorite smart playlist recipes. It provided an easy and automated way to navigate massive music libraries, when massive was measured in the thousands and not the millions. The smart playlist was a useful bridge between the hand-coded “play list” and the algorithmically driven experiences that have now propelled Spotify to global domination. Dre that have not been played in the past seven days to create an on-the-fly West Coast radio station that always serves music you like but nothing you’ve heard too recently. ![]() And a much more complex smart playlist might pull highly rated songs by Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. A slightly more complex smart playlist could collect every song by Tupac you’d rated four stars or above. A simple smart playlist might automatically pull every song in your library by Tupac Shakur. The new feature allowed users to create dynamic, self-populating playlists based on the metadata attached to specific songs. Smart playlists, though, were an entirely new beast, and didn’t show up until Apple rolled out iTunes 3 in July 2002. Playlists were a natural way to organize music collections that ballooned from a modest collection of CDs to thousands of digital tracks. It came about just as Napster and other file-sharing services made the pool of available songs seemingly infinite. People already had been compiling songs from disparate sources through mixtapes on cassettes for decades, but iTunes brought Apple’s user-friendly touch to a previously cumbersome process. ![]() Playlists were a main selling (well, downloading) point of iTunes from the beginning: The original PR boilerplate for the first version of the software touts the ability to make a “play list,” two words. The 28-year-old resident of West Palm Beach, Florida is worried that when Apple gets around to releasing its new music app for the Mac, it won’t include smart playlists, which have secretly been the best feature of iTunes-and a harbinger of the streaming age-for more than a decade. It’s almost like a gift and a curse.” -Marc Cameronįor die-hards like Cameron, though, the end of iTunes is a practical concern. “You have the opportunity to customize so many things.
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