Even the most beautiful girl you know has fallen for a Spotify robot DJ…
My parasocial relationship with the anonymous person who makes the USYD Subway Spotify playlists tragically ended this past Valentine’s Day.
I walk past this Subway multiple times a week, and over the last 10 months I began every now and then to notice a series of alt-rock and throwback bops woven in amongst the chart toppers, playing from what one would assume is a standardised Subway Australia playlist. So intrigued am I by the offbeat-ness of these intermittent songs, seemingly so aligned with my own music taste, that I start my own Spotify playlist of overheard tracks. I report each addition back to a fellow music-obsessed friend of mine with increasing incredulity.
These song choices are so specific, so atmospheric in the context of a global chain sandwich shop, that I feel insistent that they must be hand selected. Surely Subway radio isn’t moving from The Church and Crowded House into The Sundays on a random Tuesday over some first year’s meatball sub on Italian herbs and cheese? Grouped artificially by my own neurotic need for pattern-recognition, these tracks feel too intentionally united, too curated. According to Google, Subway workers are called Sandwich Artists. Whoever this mysterious Sandwich Artist cooking up a storm on aux is, it feels like they’re reading my mind, or at the very least, intercepting my playlists.
“I want them so bad they don’t even know” types my friend, after I send her the latest addition: ‘Lovecats’ by The Cure. At this point, by cunning power of observation — and with all love and light to the JFR Subway team — I’m quite aware that the hot indie sandwich man she has built up in her head doesn’t exist. Everyone I tell about *the playlist* wants me to ask the staff about it, but I’m having too much fun to interrupt the collective fantasy. Everything is romantic, right?
My curiosity finally gets the better of me as ‘Chocolate Cake’ by Crowded House blares over the speakers. “Andy Warhol must be laughing in his grave” and all that. The woman on the till tells me with a bit of a laugh that it's just an automated playlist. I’m not quite convinced. Maybe she misunderstood me? Does she understand what’s at stake here? Is she absolutely certain there’s not a playlist on the go titled ‘songs with which to woo Anneka Scholtz and friends and also sell delicious sandwiches’? Or God, have I somehow unwittingly Spotify Blended with a robot DJ??? If so, this robot has some crazy good music taste…
Look, there’s no doubt that my friends and I are just a bit delusional, and maybe love our own music tastes a bit too much, but I can’t help but feel it's also a symptom of modern-dating-shitshow escapism. The idea that the hot elusive barista/bartender/opshop employee/Sandwich Artist DJ is obviously trying to subliminally communicate with us via aux cord is a far more intoxicating thought exercise than any dry Hinge chat. In today’s wasteland of a dating landscape, all the girlies are apparently experiencing limerence of some kind or another - so hey, why not with a Spotify robot? It's 2025!
“In a world of abundance, we treasure taste,” writes Anu Atluru, in recent essay ‘Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley’ on the increasingly blurred boundaries between technology and culture. Dating apps present to us an apparent abundance of eligible partners to pick from based on shared personalities and interests, just as Spotify purports to present to us an infinite library of music that can be completely tailored to each users’ preferences. Taste is the thing we are told we have control of, but in both instances the rising influence of AI means that what is actually served up to us is highly mediated by algorithms that are homogenising tastes and types, eroding the sense of randomness and discovery that used to make both things feel fun.
The personally crafted playlist is replaced by the Spotify Daylist, and the physical mixtape tailored to your crush is usurped by the infamous Spotify Blend. What I thought was some alt-y Sandwich Artist’s highly original, carefully curated playlist, weirdly similar to my own, was more likely some mildly alternative Daylist titled ‘Main Character Antipodean Blue Sky Monday.’
Besides the AI of it all, this whole episode has me wondering whether music taste is playing a disproportionate role in our love lives. Our music tastes are often seen as reflective of our personalities and values, and can therefore be a marker of compatibility. Things like sharing playlists, experiencing live music together, and even singing together on a road trip are all bonding experiences — ones that I adore sharing with my friends and family. We all want to be seen and understood, and the prospect of finding someone out there amongst the masses who will get our ‘niche’ music taste is thrilling. Streaming services and social media now invite us to project our taste to the world more than ever before, as we share our Spotify wrapped results to our stories and select the perfect 15 second snippet of a song for our Instagram dump that communicates to our friends and internet crushes that we’re both cultured and nonchalant but also fun and silly and hot!!!
Is basing one’s attraction to someone on such superficial, aesthetic markers of taste over factors like shared world view, maturity level, and god-forbid, actual readiness to be in a relationship, actually translating to real-life dating success?
The TikTok girlies tell us, “The dating apps aren’t working so it's time to look confused at a *Fontaines DC/Mk.gee/insert alt-y male artist here* concert.” And yes, if they’re looking for their emotionally avoidant Connell Waldron, they’re probably in the right place! Even the very cleverest of my friends have been brought down by musical projection onto some performative Inner West final boss with ‘impeccable’ music taste. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by a premarital Spotify blend.
I think I’m relieved that my parasocial Subway friend/crush doesn’t exist. It's much more fun (and less heartache) to project onto an imagined persona anyway. But what are we going to do with the Spotify robot DJs? Yes, they are destroying what it means to listen to music, but at least their Blends don’t leave us heartbroken! I guess! They may be always listening, but so am I, and I’ll keep adding to the playlist as long as my Sandwich Artist robot DJ keeps cooking up a storm.
A week after my Valentine’s Day rejection, sitting in a Fishbowl, I hear their playlist transition from ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ into ‘Losing my Religion’. I’m certainly losing my belief in something, maybe everything — but if the music taste of robots is this good then maybe an AI boyfriend isn’t such a terrible idea after all.