A few days ago I saw something on Buzz Anderson's twitter stream about playlists. He was quoting someone and I think the quote was "Most people still see playlists as functional objects and not expressive objects." I have been thinking about this quote.
I looked at my iTunes collection. I have a huge music library. It is better that 200 GB and 40,000 songs. i listen to a lot of music, but not enough to even make a dent in my collection. On top of that I am adding more all the time.
I am one of those people that use playlist as a functional device and not an expressive one. I think that 9 out of 10 of my playlists are use to organize my music or to manage my music on my iPod. I am not trying to create the perfect mix. I am not trying to express myself to anyone else.
To be honest, I still like to listen to albums. As often as people say that the album is dead, I have not seen anything replace it yet. I do not know a serious artist who has gone back to singles. There are lots of artists I like that are putting out good albums.
The other reason that my playlists are not expressive is that I am not sharing them with anyone. There are lots of problems with sharing playlists. I know that most of these
Buzz has made a new software program to help people share playlists, C86. The only problem here is that the program is Mac only. That cuts out most of the people I want to share playlists with.
Playlists will keep being functional as long as people cannot share them easily.
Labels: Buzz Anderson, C86, ipod, iTunes, mp3, playlist
