Music match, love and heartbreak mix – Generation Z has turned Spotify into a dating app

Romance of borrowed words

There are about one and a half things that make us cringe in our FabIndia prints at the end of a year: the looming doom of the next 365 days and our Spotify Wrapped revealing the pitfalls of a situation the entire cosmos warned us about. Now, can you explain why that obscure Talat Mahmood crybaby sits cross-legged between the Jay-Zs and Sabrina Carpenters on your top songs list?

If communication is the Achilles heel of our generation, then the Spotify student subscription for Rs 59 is pretty much our cure crystal bracelet. We may not leave even the smallest breadcrumb for the person we’ve already adopted an imaginary dog ​​with; but be warned! On the other side of the algorithm, a seven-hour ballad is being curated.

I was 15 when I first read Stephen Chbosky’s The advantages of being a wallflower — Charlie made a mixtape for his friend Patrick.”One Winter”, Charlie’s mixtape, begins with The Smiths’ Asleep. Mixtapes may be out of style, but love, if my outrageous predictions are to be believed, is here to stay. We’ve gone from cassette tapes to sharing Spotify links at 2am, but the ultimate goal seems to be the same: emotions are complicated, borrow words. Let Morrissey to sing you sleep while taking notes for the next therapy session.

Also read: A crush doesn’t have to be lonely. Stalk Insta stories, like your way into direct messages

Find the right music

Remember sharing social media handles in class groups before starting college? That was yesterday. Generation Z wants something quirky, they want more, and they really, really want to see your Spotify account. What are you listening to right now? Are you in love? Do you like the golden 90s from Bollywood? Are you single? Oh no, are you listening to Justin Bieber without irony? Do you like Hozier? Can we get married?

It’s safe to say that the safest (or should I say, overused) strategy to get into the DMs of the kid who made you so delusional you think you’re in a Hugh Grant live-action movie is to praise the attention-seeking playlist on his account. From one Generation Z to the next, none of us mind a little validation for what is, quite literally, our life’s work.

Now imagine the sadistic pleasure of the green and black square-coded app when it realizes we’re running to it to both satisfy the initial overexcited butterflies in our system and to bury their butterfly coffins just a few months later. My longest playlist on Spotify is a record-breaking 12 hours and 12 minutes long, and was added to over eight years – each time a soul-destroying, earth-shattering, unremarkable love turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a rather lame bounce in the Matrix.

Spotify has strategically changed the way we listen to music. The idea of ​​listening to genres or entire albums is now shifting to randomly playing curated playlists. This is where Spotify’s mood mixes come in – Love Mix, Sad Mix and even better: Spotify Mixes – A personalized Playlist for you and a person of your choice, created by the algorithm, which also shows you what percentage of your music matches it.

And that’s exactly how you wrap a lovesick crowd around your little finger. Why did I spend all day and all night listening to an unhealthy amount of blues, desperately checking to see if the percentage points were slowly approaching 98…99…100? Some mysteries shall remain unsolved in order to preserve what little courage the author has left.