Spotify Playlist Messages

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About

Spotify Playlist Messages are an online social trend in which a person arranges songs in a playlist on the music-streaming service Spotify such that when the titles of the songs are read in order, they form a message. After a tweet in which a girl arranged songs in a Spotify playlist to tell a boy she was no longer interested in seeing him grew popular in mid-April 2017, others began uploading joke variations.

Origin

On April 4th, 2017, Twitter user @errikkxa^[1] tweeted a Spotify playlist her older sister made for a boy she was no longer interested in seeing. When read in order, the song titled read "Do You Still Want To Kiss Me Because I Am Kinda Lovin Someone Else But We Can Still Be Friends." Her tweet gained over 14,000 retweets and 21,000 likes. The moment, including the sister's and the boy's response, was covered by Buzzfeed^[2] a week later and others.

Spread

On April 17th, Twitter^[3] user @hanwoodley made a playlist for her crush in which the arranged song titles admitted she had feelings for them. The titles spell out "I Kinda Like You and I Wanted to Tell You You Might Not Feel the Same and That Is Okay But I Thought You Should Know if u Don't Feel It I Still… Wannabe Friends I Am Corny." That tweet, shown below, gained over 131,000 retweets and nearly 400,000 likes. It was covered in a Twitter Moment,^[4] Thought Catalog,^[5] Cosmopolitan,^[6] and more.

The popularity of the tweet inspired joke variations of the format. In the responses to @hanwoodley's tweet, other people "did the same" as her by tweeting humorous screenshots of playlists supposedly sent to crushes.

After the wave of tweets making jokingly lewd playlists, others began creating more absurd variations referencing text-based memes such as Jughead's "I'm Weird" Speech or the Mesothelioma Ad Copypasta. These were covered by SelectAll^[7] on the 20th.

Spotify Playlist Scripts

Around 2021, people began to use the Spotify playlist as script reading of iconic scenes from movies and TV shows, such as in the below TikTok^[8] post by @hertel.turtle showing a clip from The Office, where every sentence said by Michael Scott is shown as a song in the lower half of the screen. Uploaded on July 31st, 2021, the video garnered 1.3 million plays and 161,000 likes in two years.

TikTok^[9] user @playlistpenguin has dedicated a page on the platform to uploading iconic scenes in the Spotify playlist script format. On January 28th, 2023, another The Office clip (below, left) was used in the trend, this time the classic "prison Mike" clip, which received 1.2 million plays and 119,000 likes in one month. A few days later, the account posted a Game of Thrones clip, garnering 361,900 plays and 45,900 likes in one month (below, right).