Spotify‘s latest custom playlist is designed to soundtrack your throw back Thursdays.
The Your Time Capsule playlist feature launched Thursday morning, and it auto-generates a personalized lineup of songs “to take you back in time.” Spotify will reportedly create a playlist for every user between the ages of 16 and 85, in 60 markets.
The exact selection of songs, though, seems to be based on a couple factors. As Mashable points out, date of birth is one of the fields users filled out during registration, so from the get-go it has a general sense of what music was like during someone’s teens.
It's time for the ultimate throwback.
— Spotify (@Spotify) September 28, 2017
Your Time Capsule – a personalized playlist of nostalgic hits.https://t.co/7ySN08sYWT#timecapsule pic.twitter.com/GUsXAFQUy5
Then, there appears to be a certain amount of algorithmic magic that happens. From the 55 songs in my own playlist, it looks like it’s a combination of older songs you’ve definitely listened to with (maybe embarrassing) regularity over the years, and then a careful blend of deeper-cut songs that could’ve been played at the same party. So I have UGK and Outkast’s “Int’l Players Anthem”—which I still listen to pretty regularly—but then I also have Big Boi’s “Kryptonite,” which I probably have not heard start-to-finish since it first came out. I have “Crazy” by K-Ci and Jojo (off the Save the Last Dance soundtrack)—which I listened to before a karaoke evening recently—and I also have Montell Jordan’s “Get It On Tonight” from that same iconic CD. You get the idea.
2017 has been a wild year by most units of measurement, so shoutout to Spotify for finding a way to stream us to happier times.