With the popularity of streaming platforms growing, the amount of music available is huge. Playlists have become an important part of categorizing and shaping music tastes, and many of them are curated around a specific theme, mood, or activity. Popular playlists on Spotify like Pollen, Lorem, and Oyster are designed to be ‘genreless’. If you look at the way music has been distributed and promoted in the past, you can tell that it was targeted at a specific type of demographic. Today we still use genre to sort music, but listening habits have become more diverse and varied.
This change in listening habits has altered the process in which artists make records and collaborate, and the genre rules we’re willing to bend as both music creators and listeners. As a reaction to this trend, curated playlists that are genre-less have become increasingly popular on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
What does this really mean for the future of music? As the genre-less playlists continue to pop up and algorithms become smarter, music will become something that is like a soundtrack for your life, with sounds to accompany everything you think and feel. For
Written By Victoria Nelsen