365 Days of Awesome Things - Day 7

Playlists

Anybody raised in the 80's and early 90's remembers making mix-tapes. Unless you're Amish. In which case you're not reading this anyway. Unless you're one of those part-time Amish. I suppose that's possible.

Anyway.....

There was something almost creative about that whole manual process of pressing play, then pressing pause and record at the same time, then unpausing at just the right moment (finally getting that first note of the song after three or four tries), realizing the levels weren't right, stopping the recording, rewinding the cassette, waiting those few seconds for the tape to get the recordable bit, and on and on and on. Of course you had limited space so maybe you had to put a song on there that you didn't like as much as another simply because you couldn't squeeze the one you preferred onto the available recording space of that cheap, hissy piece of plastic (though there were Type II tapes, which were slightly less cheap and hissy). Of course then CDs came along, which made the whole process of recording (as long as you had tracks saved to a computer) simpler, but really, there was still that problem of limited space. It was irritating, but a labor of love. Much like love in general.

Again, anyway......

Now we have iTunes, Rhapsody, and Spotify. We can make playlists of unlimited length simply by dragging and dropping, or clicking a button, and on some of these services even instantly share them with family and friends (or in the case of Facebook, acquaintances and people we barely remember yet still feel the need to share with them what we had for dinner last night and what we thought of The Hobbit). Life is all about sharing the things we love (whether the sharee wants us to or not), and technology makes it that much easier for us to do so.

If you're a member of Spotify you even get alerted when a new playlist has been published. We get diverse playlists such as Baroque Chamber Music of the 17th century", or "My Favorite Phish", which is a 14-hour playlist made up of two of the group's shorter song, when they really weren't "feeling it".