How To Make A Playlist

Digital hoarding and organisation tips from your friendly neighbourhood librarian.

I make playlists. Every year Spotify unwrapped tells me three things consistently: I listen to more music than most people, I statistically make my own playlists, and I am a top listener of Taylor Swift. I would like to assert that in order to make listening to music a hobby it must be a serious endeavour, and also that in an age of algorithms discovery is both easier and harder to follow music. I really appreciate being able to ‘follow’ my favourite musicians and know when they’re releasing – even when it’s on somebody else’s record or a compilation, and the ability to file them in multiple places, but I also don’t want the way I listen to be a repetition of advertised or same-old music. It’s important to have various ways of listening to music – favourites on shuffle, based on ~vibes~ or current mood, or compiling the output of somebody I’m a fan of, and important to me that my collection – online or physical – can continue to grow. I do not ever delete playlists: I have a folder where I keep FKA Twigs, last year’s ~vibe~ and playlists I make for friends.

It’s cheaper to release to streaming than physical, and the options out there are much greater, more international, and at more varied points in their careers than I could manage to follow without it. I appreciate streaming for these benefits and others, even if I recognise the pitfalls of it, and strive to make the streaming platform my own. The playlist is a major barrier to me moving streaming services, because I will have to copy literally hundreds of playlists into new places and I do not have the time or inclination to do this in order to save £8 a month. Please, enter my hallowed halls of playlists and accept my wisdom to help you grow. This is an art, a science, and a learned behaviour, and I am an expert in the field.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF PLAYLIST

The artist playlist

I take artist playlists SERIOUSLY. This is the predominant way I listen to music, and to me highlights one the benefits of streaming over physical media: I can collect all of an artist’s work – including rare, unreleased, features on other discographies or things released under alternate names – and arrange them as I see fit. With physical media, I organise alphabetically by last name and then chronologically within artist [1] but on streaming it’s pure curation based on my own listening habits. I do not always listen to these from the top – especially for significant artists with a long discography, where I might go straight to a particular project, mimicking how I would pull an album off the shelf.

To create an ‘artist’ playlist, I take all albums by the artist and put them in the playlist before replacing any singles with the single version (unless it is a shorter radio edit, which would be moved to the bottom) for album artwork and bonus / b-side tracks, sometimes interwoven with the record (Caroline Polachek) and sometimes at the end (Hikaru Utada). I add my favourite songs a second time and move them to the top. I arrange the albums in a cohesive, rather than chronological, order. I check wikipedia and fansites to find any obscure or missing songs and put them somewhere cohesive. I tend to add newer songs to the top, which encourages me to listen to them more, then when a full album is released it gets the ‘singles plus a cohesive place’ treatment. Some artists (Taylor Swift[2]) organise their albums strangely – these get reordered for sonic cohesion, and sometimes songs get moved between projects for maximum impact. Some artists have adjacent people in their playlists, especially bands: members of The Killers and The National all have side projects, and for that reason they all find their way into the artist playlist.

For some artists I create a secondary playlist (or occasionally even more) that might be their live recordings, remixes, or a curated selection, eg a personal truncated ‘best of’. These are music sectioned off because I would listen to it differently, eg shuffled, and is a feature of either my favourite artists (eg Lloyd Cole; Taylor Swift) or artists with a long, typically varied discography (eg Bob Dylan; Charli XCX) whose full oeuvre may not make it to the top of my personal listening wishlist as regularly as some of their songs (I can listen to Graceland front to back endlessly, but to disregard the rest of Paul Simon’s catalogue for that would be criminal).

The vibe playlist

These are a slower process. First, the vibe must be crystallised: what exactly are you hoping to obtain? Some of these are easy to present (eg Angry, Seeking Indiespiration, which is all protest songs) but others (2026 vibe) are harder to establish. The key thing is to make and categorise this playlist first, perhaps writing a short description that may help you understand what you seek (see: 90s Hackney or something), then add things as they come into your orbit. This may take months or even years, and whilst you can begin with other people’s curated listings – either their own playlists or magazine articles, listicles, and all the online ephemera we are used to seeing – they cannot be made entirely of other people’s work or you will never listen to them because they won’t be to your taste.

This category includes most of my classical playlists because I don’t actually know that much about classical music and base my listening of the genre almost entirely on ‘vibes’ and ‘I wish I knew more about [insert item here]’.

The collection for intellectual purposes

Some music you want to keep track of for various reasons, only one of which might be to listen to in a cohesive way for fun. It might be people referencing other people or lyrics that share a theme like anxiety, months and seasons, or songs that came up on a tarot reading.

This category includes the playlists I make for work. One might assume that they’re ‘shared’, but the purpose is different: we are not enjoying these songs together (anybody who’s been in my library in one of my more esoteric themed weeks, like Classical Civilisation, will readily tell you that – teachers and students alike complain constantly and regularly elect to turn it off entirely); instead, we expand our horizons. These might be artists or songs referenced by another artist, music from theatrical productions currently on in the West End, music from various global traditions, or even songs tied together with a shared lyrical or stylistic element. From these, my most popular playlist is ‘Black Innovators‘ (for Black History Month) and my least popular is LGBTQ+ (for Pride Month), both illustrating perfectly why I continue to do this kind of work.

The shared playlist

Shared playlists are to somebody’s taste other than mine, and created for their mood or ~vibe~. These are playlists you make as a gift or to help your friend through a breakup (eg happy birthday, mum!) and must therefore conform to how they will listen (should it be shuffled? are telling them a story?). A shared playlist should be filed away from others as you won’t listen to it as much as them, and should also be researched: find things that they’d listen to, that aren’t necessarily to your taste, by going to their favourites and compiling things that remind you of shared moments.

My ‘liked’ songs

I do not listen to my ‘liked’ songs. I have a different playlist called ‘actual favourite songs’ that are my evergreen music I will never stop loving – it lacks cohesion but I can never bring myself to skip a single song on it, that’s the vibe. The ‘liked’ song are instead collected as an exercise in appreciation and exploration, a fight against forgetting what I’ve listened to and enjoyed. When I click ‘like’ on a song, it gets added to the database of things I want other people or my future self to know about, whether it’s added because ‘I will fight you about how good Mariah Carey actually is’ or ‘this was the best track on a 7/10 album’ or ‘this random Japanese indie band is really surprisingly good’. The liked songs is, in short, an angel I do not yet have it in me to wrestle with.

My criteria for ‘liking’ a song are vague and ineffable, but generally it’s “I would definitely listen to this again but I don’t know when, where, or why”. Sometimes they’re my favourite songs, sometimes they’re a reminder not to let something float away into the ether. I quite often go to some artist I haven’t heard of or has buzz from somewhere and discover that I already ‘liked’ a couple of their songs… this is a sign that they need to be on my exploratory playlists.

The exploratory playlist

I am not going to pretend I make all my exploratory playlists. This is where I utilise other people’s expertise (Decca Classics’ “If you liked Rosalìa’s Berghain try this“), curiosity (some teenager’s first forays into city pop) or the algorithm’s largesse (Spotify’s “This Is…” playlists). I quite often save somebody else’s playlist for later, though these are subject to the whims of both popularity and the lack of it – that is, you are likely to find either the most popular project by an artist overrepresented and not get a full look at their extended discography, or that a playlist is ‘no longer available’. Because of this, it is better to copy somebody’s playlist to one of your own making, or select some bits to put into a longer, more diverse exploratory playlist.

When curating my own exploratory playlists, I have two kinds: shuffleable and albums. Shuffleable are songs I ought to know already but don’t (Queen Latifah), artists I’m not sure if I’m into but are on the periphery of something I’m into. These often come recommended by other artists (Sombr), or other playlists copied into my own. Albums are generally something I know I’ll like but haven’t given the time of day to yet, and might be famous works I ought to know already (Erykah Badu) or people who I’ve enjoyed one or two songs by that I’m curious if I’m a proper ‘fan’ (CMAT), but might include the odd musical theatre project. Both kinds include intentional efforts to decolonise my music or learn more about something alongside organic things the algorithm or my media diet spits out.

I have 562 hours of exploratory playlists saved to my Spotify and getting through them all is literally something I track in my journal. It is a Sisyphean effort, it is like painting the Forth bridge, it is my personal library albatross; I treat it like those people who want to read every book they own. It’s possible, but it will take work – especially since when I listen to them I put respect into it, and won’t take it off the ‘listen later’ playlist if I got distracted by something and didn’t pay it adequate attention.

[1] Go ahead and get your hyucks in. Also, I will assert that mononymous artists belong by their surnames (eg Ciccone, Madonna; Adkins, Adele) but that a stage name is equivalent to a band name (eg Megan Thee Stallion; P!nk) unless the artist seems to proclaim otherwise (eg Hill, Montero; Germanotta, Stefani Joanne) or it reads as a given name or has been adopted permanently by the artist (eg del Rey, Lana; John, Elton). Do not get me started on book categorisation, which is much more complex and studied and different in my personal and professional collections.

[2] Track 5 is very meaningful, but I maintain the reason many people don’t like her albums at first is because of their messy tracklisting. Listen to my re-ordering of TTPD or TLOAS to see what I mean.

To get this article, and others, as physical media, subscribe now.

On This Topic:

• I am aiming to make a Late Romantic podcast, in which I will simply read out the articles I post weekly. On weeks where it’s a fiction post, I am planning to make a proper music radio show where I can share some of my playlisted songs. Somewhere in my book storage is a biography of John Peel I read as a teenager, in case you’re wondering where I got this thorough and expansive relationship with music. Also, it was the Limewire era.
• My 2026 vibe fucken slaps OK? It took me a while to get going but it’s honestly a great listen.
• A recent gift from the algorithm was Sekou, who I got my mum really into on holiday this summer and have been playing at work now we’re in autumn.

To-Do:

• Print current comments on chapter
• The 14-point list of urgent things I need to do at work (🙃) – I knocked 4 things off it today, but it’s still intimidating
• Queue up some posts!

Today’s Culture:

• I’m walking part-way to work at the moment, rather than taking a second bus. I’m hoping I can skip the gym if I do it every day.
• My friend is involved in this very sick book – I backed it, and I want my copy now.
• By the time you read this I will have attended SWIFTOGEDDON!