As the Remain at Home era uneasily subsides, the time approaches when I will return to my car and resume driving up and down the Highway 1 to get to and from UC Santa Cruz, where I teach history. That means that I will plug my iPhone into my Honda Fit and listen to my playlists on Spotify. And the other day I was thinking to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plug a little widget into your playlist that allowed Spotify to pick just one tune based on its AI take on your choices?”
So, for example, here’s my Schubert piano music list:
My imaginary widget would allow me to insert a “wild card” entry into some numerical place on the playlist, spot number four, perhaps. There Spotify would make its own choice, based on its own reading of my list. That would not be difficult, in this instance. After all, the playlist is very clear: Schubert + Piano Music. Duh. For more complicated lists perhaps the widget would allow users to input a set of criteria for the wild card, eg: Broadway Musicals + Fifties + Sixties, for example.
The point of this feature would be to try to keep the playlist fresh. One inevitably gets bored with one’s playlists. Here is a possible way that they could be programmed to stay interesting. Users could even insert the widget into their playlist more than once, allowing two, three, or even four moments of uncertainty.
I should mention that Spotify offers something along these lines: its collaborative playlist option. This allows groups of users to team up in the creation of playlists. Admittedly, in comparison to this my suggestion is kind of lazy, even complacent perhaps. And who knows whether Spotify is really up to the task of adding tunes to our playlists that measure up to our own rigorous and exacting standards for entertainment?
Still, the idea might turn out to be fun.
