Hear Me Out: Playlists need to be left behind in 2025
First of all, I love a playlist as much as the next person, and at my most recent count, I’ve created over 250 playlists on Spotify, so I’m aware that I’m writing this from inside a single-glazed glass house with a huge pile of rocks next to me.
I actually think playlists are great, as they can capture a time, a place, a feeling, acting as a 21st-century mixtape for a crush to helping rouse you out of bed on dark wintery days. So no, I’m not saying we should do away with playlists altogether, but I do think we’ve developed an over-dependence on them.
For example, a couple of months ago, I started telling a friend how much I loved Viagra Boys before realising that my version of loving them actually consisted of listening to the same track over and over again via my carefully curated ‘Stomping My Way to Work’ playlist, and, for the record ‘Aint Nice’ is a banger, while the same goes for ‘Dog Dribble’ by Getdown Services and ‘Butt No Rifle’ by Folly Group. It’s not that these bands don’t deserve deeper attention, but I’ve just grown accustomed to listening to these singular songs, each sandwiched between similar punk tracks on my aforementioned playlist.
Algorithms and curated lists offer convenience, but they also flatten the context of music’s cultural soil, its stories and continuity into isolated moments. Playlists encourage us to skip, shuffle, and extract the single ‘best’ tracks that fit a specific mood, and in doing so, they pull songs out of the environments they were built for. As far back as recorded music goes, artists have always created albums with care and intention, with huge thought accompanying sequencing, pacing, and flow, and many albums form their stories precisely because of the order their songs appear in.
One of the most brilliant recent examples is, in my opinion, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert by Little Simz, which takes the listener on a lush journey through rap, soul, and R&B, complete with soaring strings and horn sections. We follow Simz through her world as she explores her past, love, hate, family, religion and war, celebrating women of colour along the way, and across 19 tracks, she charts her trajectory through the music industry while confronting her struggles with introversion, guided by a fairy-godmother-like presence in the form of Emma Corrin, who encourages her forward: “Trust your intuition but get out of your head, masking your emotions is a weakness, it’s a kindness to let people in,” she tells her.
To understand Simz and each song, you have to listen to the album in full. I mean, there’s even a perfect segue between ‘Fear No Man’ and ‘Point and Kill’, where the instrumentation flows seamlessly from one track into the next. As listeners, we miss the chance to really connect with artists if we skip their albums: while OK Computer, To Pimp a Butterfly and The Dark Side of the Moon all have standout singles, it’s in the quieter, shadowy corners of these records that more of the artists are revealed.
As well as pulling tracks out of context, playlists and algorithms are also weakening our connection to music itself. Albums help build real fanbases, while platforms like TikTok (that make mere seconds of certain songs famous) create passive, disengaged audiences. Steve Lacy is an artist who springs to mind as a victim of this disconnect: there are hundreds of videos floating around the internet of crowds gathering at festivals to sing back his TikTok-famous line “I wish I knew, I wish I knew you wanted me”, before staring at the floor and shuffling their feet through the rest of his set.
The song, called ‘Bad Habit’, comes from his second album Gemini Rights, which has a lean runtime of just 35 minutes, something Lacy told Zane Lowe was intentional, designed to encourage listeners to play it front to back, saying, “I don’t want to take people’s lives. I want them to make a decision to want to keep playing it again”. The album is a collective story of him coming into himself after a breakup, one he wants his audience to follow him through, yet making the choice to listen to a record front to back is a decision which is becoming increasingly rare.
That’s not to say playlists don’t have their place, as great playlisting, especially human-curated, thematic lists, can be fabulous, and a playlist built with intention can tell a story of its own. For discovering emerging artists, they’re indispensable, and let’s be honest, not everything has to be intentional, and there’s nothing wrong with whacking on a playlist of noughties bangers or cheesy 1980s tunes.
However, when individual songs on playlists become the only way we consume music, we risk eroding the depth of listening, and with it, the way music circulates culturally, as albums build fanbases, power sold-out shows, and engage audiences, forging connections between artists and listeners in ways playlists simply can’t. It’s time to re-centre albums in our listening lives as we owe that to the artists who craft these worlds, and to ourselves as listeners capable of being changed by them.
