Find Your Old Soul With Spotify's "Taste Rewind"...Selecta

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Spotify have recently released the well-polished manifestation of their newest software: Rewind. Designed to cure the curious with cadence and nourish the nostalgic with Nineties trance, the aptly named Rewind - think Craig David - creates a personal playlist from each decade to date, starting from the Sixties.

The data used in the playlists’ creation comes from the combination of just three artists, chosen by you to represent your present musical taste. The software then dusts off mirrors of past decades to reflect your contemporary musical soul’s past incarnations.

wikipedia.org

Quantifying musical taste was always going to be problematic, the perspective based, subjective fluidity of all art forms is the lifeblood of their success and meaning; the relative nature of art and its impact says something very profound and very beautiful about the world; in our appreciation of the artistic we share and frolic in the intrinsic mystery of the paradoxical marriage of personal perception and communal enjoyment.

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At the moment, the choice of artists is pretty limited, but you can really see a human train of thought throughout the software’s mechanics, with the added benefit of avoiding the hipster tendency of recommending the obscure for the sake of exclusivity.

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Spotify, having snatched their presence from third party apps, have trained their focus on embedding their services within websites in bid to expand the brand with a wealth of hard-won, fresh subscribers. This, combined with the known uprising of their competition, leads me to believe that, opposed to being a quaint new feature, the gift of the ‘past playlist’ is part of a campaign to further the growth of their audience, which of course is no surprise or condemnable offence, but it does shift their effort into a slightly different category. A category where their campaign cuddles the likes of: “Want to know which famous person from history you’d be? Just give us your email address to see!” I only say this because I saw the service advertised on Facebook, clicked (of course), thus throwing myself down a sales funnel that implored me to sign-up, and dammit, I nearly did… Then I realised I was wrong. Just now, in fact, my faith is restored! All you have to do is close the sign-up box, lean back and let yourself be lead through the sexy corridors of their slick system. So I suppose you can ignore most of the above.

My message now changes to “Give it a go!” Why not see what you’d be bopping your head to in a time when headphones where a necessity and earphones a distant dream. There is no obligation to join the streaming site, just enjoy a free trip through time, and you never know, you may be guided to the Band of your life by the steel hand of inputs and algorithms. 

Leo Donnelly 

Ever wondered what would happen if you gave a half-crazed, semi-concussed, unstoppable maverick a platform to write about social media? Follow him @LeoAtSMF

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