The Rise of Niche Spotify Playlists

Creative, weirdly specific playlists show the unique ways that Gen Z interacts with music — and the Internet as a whole.

Photo Credit: Know Your Meme

It used to be that when you wanted to listen to music, you could turn on the radio and listen to the Top 40 pop hits. Or country, or oldies, or rap. Or in more recent years, you could even open up Spotify and listen to one of their playlists, like “Songs to Sing in the Car” or “Modern Soft Pop,” or even “Calming Acoustic.”

But now the music-listening game has completely changed, in that you can now listen to virtually any collection of music you want, no matter how specific. There is now a playlist for when you’re “walking out of a movie theatre and feeling like you’re on top of the world.” Or for “eating cereal on a couch outside in the moonlight.” Or for when you need to “discover your life motto AND WRITE UR ESSAY.” Or for when “[you’re] sitting in a shopping cart in an empty parking lot.” Or for when “the teacher said we could hav [a cooler way of saying “have”] headphones in.”

There are playlists for different colors: yellow, pink, blue, black. Or for different food and drink items: english breakfast tea, cookie dough ice cream, potato waffles and dinosaur nuggets.

In fact, young people are now making playlists for seemingly every person, place, thing, mood, aesthetic, situation, and setting they can think of. Here’s a popular example of one these overly specific playlists, created by Kendall Moore and with over 75,000 followers:

I imagine this playlist is so popular because of coming-of-age films such as Little Women, Lady Bird, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Call Me by Your Name, and Eighth Grade, which have become incredibly popular and oft-discussed among today’s teens, inspiring their music tastes and personal aesthetics and styles.

Other extremely niche playlists include “floating around in the ocean like a green sea turtle” by Keely McLean. Or “when the new car has aux,” captioned “i’m abby lee miller and the pyramid is for who gets the aux when i’m driving.”…