Okay, I’ll be the first to admit it. I had a phase, sometime during JC and slightly after, when I was a pathological Spotify stalker. Usually, people do this for their exes or crushes or people they’re interested in, but not me. Call it an investigative journalistic spirit (or, less euphemistically, plain nosiness), but I have this burning curiosity to know how all of my friends and acquaintances curate their music tastes, and psychoanalyse what that means for them.
In my personal defence, I never went too far — at some point, I did manage to get a life. But here are some quick tips and tricks to guide you on the psychology and culture of Spotify stalking for your next fervent forage into the psyche of a potential lover (or, if you’re like me, a potential whoever).
1. Identify your motive.
For most people, Spotify Stalking is targeted. You look at the dates of playlists, titles, and the songs added, and you sort of try to piece together what people’s frames of minds were when they created the playlist. Sure, it may be Taylor Swift, but if you see “right where you left me” you know they got dumped. If you see “Getaway Car”, you know they broke someone’s heart big time. If you see 24-hour lofi, you know they’re studying. If it’s white noise or distraught, panicked EDM, you know they’re REALLY studying. If they have 20 playlists total but they’ve made the last 10 in the past 2 weeks, something terrible is shifting the gears of their life. What most people making playlists are doing is laying out a mosaic of clues to the inner core of their lives — coded puzzle of vulnerability ready for anyone who cares enough to decipher (or, in my case, boliao enough).
To really get into the crux of Spotify stalking though, we must backtrack and think about it from the other end of the telephone. What goes into the mind of someone who makes a playlist? Clearly the medium is different from posting an Instagram story or a tweet. The presence of an activity feed you scroll through on those platforms makes being privy to other peoples’ lives casual, plausibly inadvertent.
But there’s nothing accidental about Spotify stalking. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is invasive (unless you hack), but it’s definitely a deliberate endeavour. Of course, we have the activity bar, but you do have to 1) use a laptop 2) really peer at it and click in to find out more.
Ironically, it’s a reversal of the old-school making of a mixtape. You used to have to burn songs onto a cassette tape to make a playlist, carefully recording the perfect sequence to lay out cryptic clues to whoever it is you care so much about. You used to have to touch grass and give this mixtape physically to who you want. Now, all you need is a few clicks of a button to make a playlist and throw it out into the world. In the information age, the creator can be inadvertent and casual — the seeker (previously the recipient) would in turn have to be the initiator. More accurately, it’s being a voyeur, because the creator is unaware of that the voyeur is viewing. So she hints, he hides, and I am left with the assembling of your pieces like a Spotify Sherlock with too much time on my hands.
2. Learn the Archetypes
If you’re stalking an acquaintance, or a limerence-based crush that you’re projecting something onto (and hence don’t actually know much about), it’s important that you learn your archetypes to figure out the kind of person they are. It turns out that genetic differentiation has failed us and so we are pretty much the exact same product brainwashed by the song algorithm machine, so it is relatively easy to classify people (thus why MBTI works so well).
→ Note that all gendered terms (“bros” and “girlies”) aren’t actually restricted by gender, it’s the vibe. But if it is actually subverted, you might want to question their a) sexuality b) how dark-sided it is within the context of the person.
a) Finance /Economics / Gym Bros
This archetype is ridiculously predictable. Think Kanye, 21 Savage, Drake (replaced by Kendrick) in their workout playlists (playlist titles include “vibes”, “Summer of 2022”, “Hype”, or unostentatiously, “Gym”) with a dash of sad mandopop (“emo”, “Sad Chinese Songs”). Some variations include Frank Ocean but only the most popular songs from the Blonde album (Ivy, Pink + White, Self Control) or, occasionally, Lost or Super Rich Kids from channel ORANGE. They are huge huge fans of The Weeknd, but never his older stuff - usually Starboy onwards.
Incidentally, I do believe that the lyrics of the songs this particular group listens to tends to form links in their neurons that give them slightly misogynistic tendencies and extremely crazy levels of audacity (or, to turn it around, ambition). If you want to marry rich ASAP, look for these telltale signs. Just get ready to be talked down to about nebulous, Not-In-the-Bible concepts like “asset management” and “the stock market” on the daily.
b) Location Unknown ◐ Girlies
HONNE, Swift, keshi playlists with a cup of matcha on the cover, sunset at a beach, or whatever an “LA Vibe” is supposed to be. There’s a tendency for a smattering of SZA (“Normal Girl”, “Good Days”, cheeky “Kill Bill”), Doja in her earlier eras (but not the cow one), maybe even some KPop and K-Indie for those more hallyu-inclined (AKMU, IU, SEVENTEEN, NewJeans). These are the type of girlies that you’d find in cafes during brunch, in Korea during the winter and Japan / Taiwan during the summer.
They make vlogs of their trips overseas, have an entire row of highlights that confuse between what each category is, and probably have a film cam / food account. They have a unique girlcore emoji to them (usually one of the following: sunflower, daisy, sakura, tulip, matcha cup, coffee cup, white heart, pink heart with sparkles, pink double hearts, strawberry (guilty), teddy bear, ribbon). They write little notes for you before exam seasons, send you reassuring texts, and habitually thank you for the day after you go out with them. They get sad quite often, but it’s never OFF-THE-RAILS ill, so you can cheer them up with sweet pastries, a Ghibli movie, and a hug. I am quite a fan of this sort of girlie, but I would recommend them deleting the Shein app off their phone for the sake of not merely the environment but to break that pointless dopamine loop.
c) The Pretentious, Artsy Ones
I recently went to a Mitski concert, which contrasted drastically from the Phoebe Bridgers one. Phoebe was lethargic, dispassionate, and almost tired. Mitski started crawling on the floor like a dog, and gave a long speech about how growing old (getting closer to death) has only made her feel sexier and hotter. Anyway, that sort of encapsulates what people in this genre are about. The Spielrein-Freudian death drive (which is a fancy way to say self-destruction), getting into complex homoerotic relationships and being emotionally unavailable. They also really like French philosopher-literary writers.
(I’m sure the question here is: is the call coming from within the house? The answer is: I actually did not really like The Stranger all that much.)
d) The REALLY Pretentious, Artsy Ones
I sent my friend G this matrix recently that perfectly encapsulates the sort of music that this sort of person listens to.
“Shoegaze” music (because the target audience is incapable of making eye contact), incel indie pop, the whole schtick - think Deftones, Slowdive, midwest emo, and “dad rock”, whatever that means.
My advice to you when engaging with people of this archetype is that you should actually probably just stay away. There’s approximately a 20% chance that this person is your soulmate, but 80% is really good odds for this going completely awry and ruining your life permanently and forever. There’s something DSM-5 diagnosable-y wrong with them, but that doesn’t make them unloveable. What makes them unloveable is their egregious Letterboxds and obsessive need to colour-coordinate their wardrobes (and mess with their hair).
It must be commented on, however, that your stalkee may be a mix of all of the above. It’s a common hybrid for the REAL manipulators to do both a) & c), and there seems to be a real recent cultural appropriator-y movement toward d) (which we term fake-cel. An example would be the aforementioned G — though he would clamour for me to tell you guys that he’s liked these bands all his life), possibly because a bunch of said bands are doing world tours right now or perhaps because the cultural conscience has gotten sick of everything else. Either way, the OG d) listeners protest, “My in-celibacy is NOT your costume!”
There’s also a bunch of people who exclusively listen to music in their niche (JPop, Classical, Christian), but I feel like those kinds are very easy to spot and comprehend on an ethnographic level. If you like what they’re into, you’ll get along. If not, move along. Simple.
3. Concluding Remarks
The truth is that when Spotify stalking has been the most fascinating for me (and for many of my friends) was when it was profoundly unhealthy. You only scramble (read: settle) for coded language and read behind the lines when you’re half-crazy over someone (doesn’t have to be romantic, could be in a serial killer way, kidding) or half-crazy on a macro level (recluse, need human interaction without actually talking to humans). My habits got so bad that I’m pretty sure certain characters started making playlists to send me messages because they knew I would stalk them, which is a sort of meta-level Cartesian theatre tier of chronic onlineness that is a little over-the-top (which sobered me up real quick, so I got out of it).
As I’ve clearly highlighted above, I was able to curb my Spotify stalking tendencies by getting a life. This is a course of action I recommend. There is only so much intel you can gain from Spotify stalking, and you could get better intel by hanging out with your acquaintances and friends and the person you’re obsessing over (though that might end in disillusionment).
There’s also a case to be made about bringing back cassette tape culture. I think it’s an interesting proposition to make physical media for various eras of your life, and also give mixtapes to people you desire to be closer to. (This could be metaphorical or otherwise, because no one owns cassette tape players). Disconnecting from the onlineness of it all might also preserve your already-fried brain neurons a bit more, and in fact it might be one of the rare moments we can even do so before the AI revolution uploads our consciousness onto a cloud drive and we start strolling-scrolling through Peggy Gou concerts with our mind as our body rots in a dental chair.
Essayist Geoffrey O'Brien described this definition of the mixtape as "perhaps the most widely practiced American art form”.
I say all of this, but I do indulge in the occasional cocaine bump (metaphor, Singpass) of dopamine when I look through the new playlists my friends make. They’re an interesting, modernistic way of self-expression, and I do think that sometimes it tells more about their mental state / life stage / etc than what they can fully elucidate to me. It works in the reverse as well — sometimes, when I feel something imperceptible and hard to put into words, I just create a playlist and put some songs that resonate with me in it (why I had, like, 10 playlists with the exact same songs in them, just in different orders). That’s the good thing about music as a whole, isn’t it — you get to tell the void things that you can’t / don’t want to say out loud. You just put on Space Song by Beach House and move the fuck on.
Sorry for the lack of updates for so long — I’ve been busy with exams. Summer’s finally sort of here, and the every-now-and-then sun has been super nourishing (and so has been the company of my friends and family). My life has been uneventful but rewarding. Please subscribe and look forward to more ♡
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