Without A Net

No, not the Grateful Dead live album, but rather thinking about the lack of constraints in a Spotify playlist and perhaps longing for a medium that provides more structure.

Though I’m definitively a millennial in terms of when I was born, I feel like I came of age with the specter of Generation X hanging over me. What am I thinking, specifically, about here? The music I like? The views I have? The way I dress? What is it?

I’m someone for whom the cassette tape was very much a thing of my youth. I taped songs off the radio. I called into radio stations to request songs in the hopes that they would play them, and then I could record the song on my cassette at home. I carried around a walkman (and a discman, which, honestly, seems just as ancient). I bought more than my fair share of cassingles. I made mix tapes (yes, mix tapes) for people. Writing all of these things down make me feel like a total dinosaur, but I digress…

The shift towards more digital music (iPods, iTunes, Mp3s, etc) happened during this period too when I was coming of age, but the idea of the mix tape that was a cassette was a reality for me.

Now, when that shift happened… honestly, I didn’t really mind. I hurried to buy an iPod as soon as I could and was excited to try it out. After going through the process of burning a mix CD but using other CDs for the audio… I was ok to make the switch to mp3s and generally having things geared around the computer.

But as we’ve moved to where even giving someone a CD seems positively archaic and we’re only sharing Spotify playlists, I’ve started to feel a bit frustrated.

What it is that I’m finding more frustrating about the Spotify playlist as the chief replacement for the mix tape (and, later, mix CD) is its limitless-ness. There’s nothing constraining you in the way that the capacity of a cassette tape or blank CD does. Thus, when you’re making a playlist for someone else or just because… how long do you make it?

In theory, your playlist could be infinite (which is kind of cool, but also… doesn’t really work). Do you use the 80-minute threshold you’d get on a CD-R? Do you have a set number of songs to include? Also, you could keep adding and changing the songs that are on it. Part of what made making a mix tape/mix CD such a big thing is you’re putting that stuff down on… not paper, but either cassette or CD. You’re doing something concrete (yeah, conceivably you could tape over your mix tape, but I think you get my point).

There’s a quote attributed to the poet Robert Frost that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. Sometimes I feel that way about making playlists and mixes on Spotify with their lack of time constraints. A good mix tape/mix cd, to me at least, is a bit like a sonnet. It has to have that structure, that defined form, to make it really work. Beyond just longing for physical media, I think that’s what I really miss about the days of cassettes and burned CDs.