I’m Obsessed with Other People’s Spotify Playlists | Unpublished
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Source Feed: Walrus
Author: Dhriti Gupta
Publication Date: July 25, 2025 - 06:30

I’m Obsessed with Other People’s Spotify Playlists

July 25, 2025

T here is no better place to online-stalk someone than Spotify. Forget scouring their Instagram followers or tracking down their high school volunteer experiences on LinkedIn. Don’t waste time perusing photos their mom posted on Facebook nine years ago. If you want to get to know someone—and I mean really know them—there is no profile more intimate than one created on the music-streaming platform.

Spotify doesn’t function as a true social media app. You can’t share standalone pictures or posts, and you can’t message other users. But you can view other users’ public playlists, a live feed of what they’re listening to, as well as who they follow and who follows them. It’s this curious charade of privacy that’s so compelling. The upright citizen knows not to go rummaging around someone’s room, even if the door is open. But a journalist and Gemini such as myself? I can’t resist.

You can obtain your subject’s username voluntarily (by asking nicely), innocently (by talking about your Spotify account until they offer up their own), or secretly (through a complex process of cross-referencing names on Instagram).

This spycraft lies somewhere between deduction and delusion. A new playlist composed solely of SZA’s assorted works indicates this person has just been biblically wronged. If I open Spotify at 2 a.m. and see someone listening to “Tibetan Singing Bowls for Sleep,” I know that they, unlike me, have chosen peace. But if the user below them in the activity feed is blasting a playlist called “mid-twenties existential meltdown,” we might be kindred spirits. A person who’s been adding to the same list since 2020, bravely captioned “All songs,” embodies the kind of nonchalance that I and my 297 playlists could never dream of. If I notice my crush listening to a bossa nova crooner from the ’70s, they are most certainly in love with me. Everything means something.

It’s not just crushes either. I find myself curious about everyone: colleagues, frenemies, people I’ve lost touch with, celebrities I pretend are my friends, classmates I barely talked to in high school. I have a desire to know people deeply, almost better than they know themselves. This knowledge can make me feel closer to others, even when they’re out of reach. It can also provide the illusion of explanation where I was given none. A close lyrical analysis of an ex’s playlist could provide closure as to why I was dumped—or, at the very least, serve as a reminder that I have better taste than they ever will.

Still, as I’m scrolling through the songs someone found solace in at sixteen, I wonder if this is an invasion of privacy. I question if this type of investigation is the best use of my time, especially when the Spotify window is shielding me from the ominous blinking of a cursor just behind it—an article I’m supposed to be writing or research that’s due in a few hours. Other times, my never-ending quest for data can give me ideas I’d rather not have, like the suspicion that a failed situationship listens to a certain playlist while getting busy with their new partner. More often than not, my pursuits make me realize it’s futile to have a superiority complex about music in a city like Toronto, where everyone has obscure taste and a septum piercing to boot.

But maybe I observe others so carefully because I hope someone is out there doing the same for me—caring enough to seek out the thoughts I don’t broadcast and the dutifully curated memes I upload as playlist covers. It’s like longing for an anonymous classroom candy gram on Valentine’s Day, harbouring a small hope that you’re more important than you think you are.

That being said, I’ve recently been gravitating toward using Spotify on my phone, where a lack of features makes it more tedious to conduct a deep dive. Pseudosciences are fun only until they’re not. You can make anything mean what you want it to mean and believe in it as if it were true. But I try to remember that while I’m peering into a crystal ball of my own making, the person on the other end is probably just listening to their AI-generated daily mix.

The post I’m Obsessed with Other People’s Spotify Playlists first appeared on The Walrus.


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