Somehow we’ve managed to get the point where we trust robots to drive an actual car on an actual road all by itself but getting a computer to recommend you things you might like based on the things you already like is a seemingly impossible task. It turns out the complexities of human taste are actually kinda difficult to map and predict properly, for instance: just because I listened to one Enya song a bunch of times doesn’t mean I want months of recommendations of six-hour-long panpipe music mixes for shops that sell crystals, YouTube.
These algorithms tend to churn out a pretty even mix of obvious stuff you already know about and stuff you couldn’t care less about. Spotify, however, is surprisingly good at reading your mind. The Discover Weekly playlist, as an example, tends to serve up at least two songs per week that I am genuinely shocked I’ve never heard before on account of how perfect they are for my tastes (there’s a great article here on how they got that magic to work).
Spotify’s latest achievement in the art of sonic telepathy is their Time Capsule playlist, which uses a combination of your age, your current tastes and your blood type (note: one of these is not true) to drum up a playlist of nostalgic bangers from your teens and early 20s. For obvious reasons, it’s only being served up to users over 16, who are actually old enough to have a time to be nostalgic about.
Anecdotally, mine was pretty spot on, featuring a solid mix of MF DOOM, Gorillaz, Metallica, and Coldplay (all of which I was indeed listening to a lot at 15 in the cultural wasteland of 2005), as much as a nostalgia binge as it was a terrifying reminder that I might be the whitest person alive. It wasn’t 100% accurate, though – the amount of Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, and All-American Rejects on mine speaks to a way, way more emo high school experience than I actually had.
If you want to check yours out, there are a few ways you can get to it. If you use Spotify in your browser, you can get it by clicking right here. On both the desktop and mobile apps, the playlist should be sitting at the top of the ‘browse’ section, if not, you can find it under ‘decades’.
If it’s accurate: congratulations on your ~2-hour playlist of dope throwback bangers. If it’s not accurate: rest easy knowing that the robot apocalypse is still a little while away.
