Playlists just don’t feel the same. Maybe that’s me showing my age (I’m 47 in case you ever wondered), but they just have a less curated, less pored over feel to them than the staples of my childhood, adolescent, and early adult compilation experiences: mixtapes and burned CDs.
With each of those formats, there were limitations that brought about consideration; you had a finite amount of space, and you couldn’t just hit shuffle, so the order of the tracks, the overall vibe of the collection, was something we thought about in great detail… at least I did. Songs had to flow into one another with some kind of sense; their place in the track listing being as far from random as possible.