What Wildly Specific POV Playlists Tell Us About How We Listen Today
Whether you’re looking to escape into a cottage-core wonderland, enact fiery revenge on a deadbeat ex, or cosplay as a bigtime magazine editor, there’s a POV playlist for you.
The days of lovingly compiled mix cassettes (the scribbled tracklists, the dual-deck recorders) or even burned CD compilations (the Sharpied titles, the whirr of the disk drive) are mostly gone, replaced with algorithmic streaming playlists that have all the charm and character of a Cybertruck blasting the State Farm Insurance jingle. Yet we still yearn for the curatorial power of a more personal mix.
Enter the POV playlist. First popularized as a TikTok meme, the “point of view” format is often used for inspirational purposes (“POV: You are living your dream of drifting cars”) or for observational gags (“POV: The Parent That’s Jealous of You”). The POV structure serves not just to grab viewers’ attention away from an endless tide of content, but to evoke a feeling of authenticity: No, you’re not secretly watching #sponcon, this message is meant for you. And in an era of dwindling attention spans, creators—and companies—are always looking for a more direct method of user engagement. The format migrated to music streaming services a couple of years ago, and now there are a seemingly endless number of these human-generated playlists, especially on Spotify.
There are ones that hit on basic emotions, like “pov: you’re tired of everything,” which has been saved almost 16,000 times and includes dreamily despondent selections like Radiohead’s “No Surprises” and Beach House’s “Space Song.” But just like mixtapes of yore, the more specific the POV, the better. Such as, “pov; youre living in your little folksy cottage and its time to gather mushrooms,” featuring the soft-strumming likes of Vashti Bunyan and Jessica Pratt. Or “pov: im acquitted after burning down your house,” mostly a conduit for female rage that includes Chappell Roan’s “My Kink Is Your Karma” and Grimes’ “Kill V. Maim.” Or even “Pov: Your a bottom and getting railed roughly” (8,242 saves; 605 songs, including several by the Weeknd).
I might have kissed goodbye the childhood dream of being on the masthead of a glamorous New York magazine, but I can still pretend I made it when I’m listening to “pov: you’re a big time magazine editor during the early 2000s” while writing this piece. Somewhere along that 68-song playlist, which features Kate Hudson’s writer character from 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days on its cover, I hit Anna Nalick’s 2004 pop-rock hit “Breathe (2 a.m.)” and kind of felt like I really was on deadline for a doorstop print publication and about to shut my vintage Apple laptop. The playlist has been saved by more than 3,700 nostalgic keyboard tappers.
POV playlists can be an antidote to the proliferation of something like Spotify’s bizarre “daylists,” which are A.I.-generated and supposed to supply music to match certain times of the day. (Daylists can also be a bit buggy: As I am writing this on a November morning, my daylist is called “panicked summer Monday afternoon.”) Such front-page technical experiments are connected to a round of layoffs at the company last year, as it seeks to further automate its recommendation processes.
In contrast, POV playlists encourage us to listen based on shared experiences or fantasies. These playlists have a way of sticking with us long after they wrap up, and the intense feelings they evoke are a key part of what makes them so engaging not just to listen to, but to craft. Meme formats are democratic by design, and with a POV playlist you can throw together Lana Del Ray and Clairo songs for your own bespoke yearning experience—not just living through your favorite artist but literally creating your own score to whatever daydream you’re experiencing. With their crowds of listeners all buying into the same shared atmosphere or aspiration, they offer a less isolated, more social way of listening than Spotify’s algorithmically personalized mixes, even if they still rely on flawed streaming platforms for their distribution.
These playlists preserve a slight human touch, representing user “folksonomies,” or organic, user-generated systems of classifying content compared to boring corporate categories like “mid-20s white woman who likes pop-rock.” They set the scene, address the listener, and offer a seductive promise—that however you ended up listening, whether by direct search or through an automated recommendation, this group of songs is bespoke and meant just for you (or the mushroom-gathering woodland sprite of your dreams).
That feeling of fate, or maybe democratic discoverability, can be empowering when so much of our watching and listening is spoon-fed to us through computational recommendations. Whether listeners remember the era of physical tapes and CDs or not—and many of these playlists’ slangy titles and teenage concerns suggest that their makers were barely sentient during the age of physical media—POV playlists draw on our desire to feel like more than a datapoint. Of course, this is all great for Spotify, letting the company capitalize on the free labor of users generating these mixes while keeping the rest of us logged on too.
Algorithmic playlists encourage thoughtless, passive listening habits, while POV playlists invite a sense of materiality, specificity, and human connection. They offer a sense of human serendipity to listening that’s often missing from our streaming culture today. When I listen to a POV playlist I’m trying to buck Spotify’s omniscient algorithm in lieu of a human DJ who might make mistakes, but who might also introduce me to something unexpected. Still, these POV playlists are often surfaced through algorithmic search recommendations. And even if this playlist medium allows us to be more active participants, trying to listen to one another, there’s always an algorithm eavesdropping on our activity in the background.
With all their imperfections, POV playlists, at their best, can feel like oases of humanity amid streaming’s algorithmic desert. I might forget the random Daily Mix 1 that I half-listened to while cleaning my apartment, but I instantly know the order of songs I selected for my playlist “pov: you are coming of age”—a collection I strung together for my friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah, trying to remember what it felt like to be 13.
Since my mini-bestie and I share the same music taste, it wasn't hard to craft a mix that tapped her favorites: Taylor Swift of course, Carole King to represent the Gilmore Girls, and Billie Eilish’s hit from the Barbie soundtrack. But it also gave me the chance to play music teacher and try to sell her on Sleater-Kinney and Haim for her feminist alt-rock education. That’s the thing about any good point of view: It’s always shifting and evolving to meet the moment.
