A Dispatch from the Trenches of Algorithmic Living

Sometime in 2021, I opened the Spotify app, navigating my way to a recent playlist I had made featuring Arlo Parks, Brittany Howard, Hozier, Charlotte Day Wilson, Radiohead, and other artists known, at least in part, for their melancholic sounds and senses. Immediately, under the banner “You Might Like,” was a featured playlist titled “sad girl starter pack.” As is common in the age of targeted ads, privacy agreements, and social media, I felt simultaneously exposed and validated. As someone who surveys the personalized “Daily Mixes” and “Discover Weekly” playlists, searching for new music daily, it seemed like the perfect addition to my growing playlist collection.

Here were 75 songs, some by artists I knew and others I didn’t, that at first glance seemed tailored to my taste. But, the longer I stared at my screen, my excitement turned into skepticism. Read more: “When You Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone” Something was off.

It, like many of Spotify’s mood-based playlists, claimed to be curated based on a sense, as opposed to a genre, decade, or other category marker. However, unlike the application’s popular mood-based playlists (e.g., “Feelin’ Good,” “All the Feels,” “Broken,” “Chill Vibes”), this playlist evoked both gender and affect, in its name alone. Clearly, it was meant to conjure, capture, and attract a specific version of both femininity and sadness through sound.

But what was that version? And what did it, supposedly, sound like? Since first pressing play on Charlotte Day Wilson’s “Work,” one of the featured tracks, Spotify’s “sad girl starter pack” has continued to haunt me.

Early into 2023, Spotify launched a global music program titled GLOW, celebrating and promoting LGBTQIA+ artists and creators. This new digital music hub boasts “Sounds from the Community —playlists featuring artists who identify as LGBTQIA+—as well as a collection of playlists deemed “LGBTQIA+ Favorites.” Among this latter collection is none other than “sad girl starter pack,” which also happens to be the hub’s most-liked playlist, by far, with over 1.3 million likes. Seeing it there, I once again felt attacked, but from a different angle.

To a queer woman who still loves listening to slow, sad songs, how could the same playlist that once raised questions about sadness, femininity, and sound manage to provoke new questions about queerness, too? In addition to being in the GLOW hub, the playlist’s new description also unmistakably invokes queerness. Two years ago, when the playlist was first released, the description read, “Is her favorite color sage green?” A nod at one of the trendy colors that defined late 2021 and 2022, the description feels playful, harmless, and more so a reference to an aesthetic than a gesture toward the rainbow of identities constituting queerness.