Art of the Playlist

During last month when I focused on buying digital singles, a preconception I had about Bandcamp was really re-enforced-- they are a pretty terrible platform for playlists.

In Bandcamp’s “Collection,” the page view where you view all the music you’ve purchased, singles are put on equal hierarchy with albums. A single is handled as if you bought an album, but just have 1 track (or however many individual tracks you purchase) available.

This works great for listening for a whole album front-to-back, like Across The Multiverse. If I put on the Sondre Lerche single though, I’ll have to go back into the app/desktop after the 3 minute song is done playing to select something else. There’s no playlist nor queue functionality.

Spotify on the other hand, almost feels like it was built for making playlists. Creating and editing playlists is simply done from both desktop and app. I really enjoy the multiple privacy settings-- you’re able to have a private playlist, a public one, or even a collaborative one where your friends are able add music.

Playlist culture has led to a huge shift in music consumption. By having thousands of users subscribing, the owners and curators of some of the larger and popular playlists essentially have become tastemakers, delivering recommended tracks and blowing up otherwise lesser known artists.

Dealing with Bandcamp’s lack of playlist functionality became specifically challenging for me at a recent party at our house. Usually I would go to my current Spotify playlist of favorite songs of the moment and hit shuffle. Now that I have given up my premium subscription, if I do this I’ll have a bunch of ads intermittently throughout the night, interrupting the vibe and lead to a lot of people saying "uhhh... why don't you have Spotify premium?" Using Bandcamp I can still play individual albums, which can be fun (and I’ve also played LPs on my record player sometimes), but more often than not I want to have a playlist of several varying artists. Bandcamp as of now is not the platform for this.

The best workaround I’ve found for this, is downloading (*gasp*) the mp3s to my desktop and using iTunes, or to my phone and using Google Play. I assume iPhone users can do something similar with iTunes for iOS. This way you’re free to use play queues or make playlists to your heart’s content. Still, it is a somewhat inconvenient extra step and takes up space either on your phone memory or on you cloud storage.

I am sure Bandcamp has some reason they are not widely rolling out playlist/play queue capability and maybe someday we’ll find out. Bandcamp Weekly is a cool discovery feature which operates somewhere between a podcast, radio show, and playlist. If they can roll out this functionality to the wider user base, it would certainly be a game-changer.

Until then, I think Spotify will remain king of playlists.