Social Media and Online

This is a screenshot of a “daylist” on Spotify, and particularly some of the words used to describe the songs in this playlist. Users of Spotify do not always see the tagging system behind-the-scenes when they are searching for songs or a playlist, but some of these tags can be noticed on the “daylist” that Spotify makes for its users. This “daylist” has links to other, related playlists based around particular words or phrases, as can be seen here in the underlined green text. These are interesting tags because they seem to be pretty unique ways to label music; a lot of people just search or categorize music by artist or genre, whereas Spotify’s tagging system also seems to be getting into emotion and general vibes of the music. Spotify’s tagging system could allow for a better searching experience, connecting the listener to music based on much more specific parameters than genre or artist, but these categories can also be highly subjective, from the perspectives of both the person categorizing the music and the person searching for the music. When you search for music, what words or phrases do you use to search? What songs might you expect to be in this particular daylist, based on the given tags?

This is the caption from a post on the Instagram account “926bar” promoting an event at 926 Bar and Grill. Something interesting about this caption is that it doesn’t use hashtags as a method of sorting, but instead tags itself and other accounts for quick access to these accounts, and to potentially get the attention of people who might be interested in this event because of their interest in these other, related accounts. Also, because they tagged themselves, it seems as though they are anticipating unfamiliar viewers seeing this post, and they want those viewers to have quick and easy access to this account, even if those viewers are not paying close attention to who made the post as they are scrolling, or were previously unfamiliar with the account. Tagging by other accounts rather than hashtags is an interesting way to get the attention of people who might be interested in this event but might not otherwise have seen it, even if they followed certain hashtags.