The OffBeat #50: 50 Playlists for Work and Life

A very special, playlist-packed 50th issue

Apr 14, 2024

I can’t stop thinking about Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, specifically how algorithms have flattened culture by influencing what we consume and what gets produced.

Personal illustration: I was thrilled to discover Spotify’s new “daylist” (mood-curated music that adapts to my daily routines!) but then horrified to read

Ted Gioia

’s piece on Spotify’s “fake artist problem” (Gioia has 25+ years experience as a jazz musician, critic, educator, and author and when he checked out one of Spotify’s pre-made jazz playlists, he knew only 2 of the first 15 artists featured—because the others don’t actually exist).

Cultural consumption, music in particular, is increasingly passive. And that’s fine some of the time, like when you’re just looking to zone out to get some work done with the right acoustic energy in the room. But there’s something huge that’s lost with the absence of intentional, effortful personal curation.

Enter: playlists. Since reading Filterworld I’ve made it a point to do three things:

Spend most of my music-listening time on albums or tracks I sought out, or on playlists I personally created or I know another human did
Check out the bio of the artist(s) on a track that comes on and I’m into
Mine music recommendations from human curators vs. giving the algorithm carte blanche to populate my queue

Through this lens and in honor of 50(!) issues of The OffBeat, I wanted to share 50 favorite playlists for work and life. My taste in music is like my taste in books: eclectic, with a partiality toward a few genres and a bias for good craft. Maybe that’s a good thing in terms of making the algorithm work harder to triangulate my preferences.

Onto the music: