Great topic, @shalahk!
I’d say Spotify has been a fairly integral part of my everyday life for quite a while now. I tend to use the Spotify app for much of the day, mainly listening to music on the desktop app, as I spend most of my time at home these days.
As for how Spotify affects my life, I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do have a good guess, which is that I’d say that music can calm me or elevate my mood—perhaps because tuning into the melodies, rhythms, and timbres of the music that I like elicits positive emotions for me. I’m not sure how this occurs, neurobiologically speaking; it’s simply an observation. On the other hand, the opposite effect can happen when I have to listen to music that I find unpleasant (e.g. music playing in the background at a friend’s house or on the radio in a shop), which can cause me to feel on edge; however, this fortunately doesn’t happen very often.
As for the second part of your topic regarding how playlists can regulate our moods, I tend to spend a lot of time listening to my own playlists, or songs that are in my playlists, rather than exploring unfamiliar tracks (as much as I enjoy discovering music that I like, I tend to be picky and usually don’t save music to my library that I’m listening to for the first time). I have playlists for different genres of music, which provide collections of tracks to play when I feel like listening to different sorts of music; and as such, they make it easy to access songs I already know I like, within any genre that I might want to hear at a given time.
However, I’ve found that I tend to enjoy some genres of music more than others. For example, during the past few years I’ve noticed that I tend to listen mainly to psychedelic- and stoner rock music, and to a lesser extent space rock and stoner/doom metal. I can’t say why my musical preferences are as such; just that it seems I’m less picky when it comes to these genres, possibly because they’re more likely to elicit a positive emotional response for me, and so I end up with larger collections of songs that I enjoy upon repeated listens for these genres. On the other hand, there are also some genres of music that I don’t have playlists for—e.g. country, indie, pop, punk, rap—as I tend to find them unpleasant and have few (if any) tracks in Liked Songs that I could use to build a playlist for these genres.
Though I spend most time on Spotify using the desktop app, I nearly always wear headphones playing music on Spotify from the mobile app when I go on walks in the park, which I do on most days. I currently reside in a city environment and have autism, which is probably why I find the abundance of loud noises that I inevitably hear when I go outside to be stressful; having music to block out the noises helps me feel calm and in a positive mindspace while outside in a harsh city environment. Unfortunately, this means that I choose not to ride my bike, which I think is more fun than going on walks, since wearing headphones while riding a bike isn’t safe—especially in a densely-populated city.
In a more concise summary, 1) Spotify affects my daily life by allowing me to easily listen to music that I like, in turn probably calming me or elevating my mood; and 2) playlists play a key role in this positive effect on my mood, by making it easy to access tracks that I know I like.
Cheers!
AdamDamonSpotify Star
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