Every new season requires a new music refresh. Check out one of these great Spotify playlists for some new hits to put a spring in your step (pun intended!)
- Pop 2019: For the “Hot Now” Listener
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Winding between the far-reaching guitar tones of “Shallow” and trilling hip-hop influenced cuts off the Spiderman: Into The Spider-Verse soundtrack, this playlist has one of the broadest definitions of pop possible — and that’s what makes it so fantastic. Rae Sremmurd and Taylor Swift were meant to live side by side, and yes, fans of Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande and Shawn Mendes also listen to Juice Wrld. This is 2019 in a nutshell, all the best hits, beats, and hooks, all in one place.
Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Tp5brassis90SQmWnzJSS
- Gold School: For Some Old School
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If you’re one of the proud few who look down their nose at “Soundcloud rap” and crave the good old days of “real hip-hop,” well then, this playlist is for you. Peppered with hits from the early decades of rap right on down to the late 2000s, there’s plenty of DMX, 50 Cent, Ludacris, Outkast and more to sate your tates for the golden era days. And even if you like modern rap songs, it’s nice to have a trip down memory lane is always just a click away.
Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWVA1Gq4XHa6U
- Charli XCX’s Motherf*ing Future Playlist: For the Female Power Moves
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While she’s on tour with Taylor Swift and Camila Cabello — two of the greatest pop stars of the current era — Charli XCX has had an ear out for the stars that might be coming up behind them. Though she’s certainly busy opening up the all-female arena show, releasing new music, and traveling all around the world, she’s still managed to find time to update this extraordinary playlist, playfully dubbed “the motherf*ing future,” which features mostly women who are currently on top of their game, or artists from the past who were way ahead of their time. If there’s a great new pop song building momentum, it’s probably on here. And Charli doesn’t discriminate between indie, trendy, popular, or commercially successful — if it’s good pop music that sounds like the future, it’s here.
Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3la0phrqzu9s3k5xBqHj2S
- The Longest Mixtape: 1000 Songs For You – For The “IDK what I want to listen to” Listener
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If you’re making a mixtape for somebody, it usually only has somewhere between 10-20 songs so as to not overwhelm the recipient. Caribou took a significantly opposite approach: In 2015, he shared “The Longest Mixtape,” which features over 1,000 songs. Caribou (real name Dan Smith) has called it “a musical history of my life,” and since he’s somebody who’s spent a lot of time poring over old vinyl and other musical oddities, there are surely some engaging picks among the thousand songs here.
Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Dg0J0ICj9kKTGDyFu0Cv4
- New Music Friday: For the “teach me something new” listener
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For the purposes of this guide, I’ll try to stay away from Spotify’s in-house playlists, not because they’re not excellent (they are), but because this is about discovery, and Spotify’s playlists are the most obvious picks that you could easily find on your own without my direction. That said, it’s also a good idea to rely on them to provide a regularly updated playlist of the new stuff that’s hitting their platform on a weekly basis. That means that their New Music Friday playlist is the most essential resource if you want to know what’s new every week.
Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX4JAvHpjipBk
Happy listening!