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.
