An audio streaming service called "Spotify" describes itself as delivering to you "all the music you'll ever need. ... Listening is everything. Millions of songs..."
This much is true, but it's not how we use it.
What this digital portal to a gigantic googleplex of music has become, in reality, is your grandmother's mixed tape. Millions of people have downloaded the Spotify app but then quickly narrowed down what they would listen to, they saved what they liked and in doing so gave it a title. There are also thousands of Spotify users who take it a step further by rearranging their saved songs in a specific order.
Why?
Perhaps by arranging and then rearranging music in sequential rankings folks are aiming for something more than just music. People create a list of songs that, when played back, has an intended effect on the listener.
Take, for example, the playlist for "Surf's up." Here, a Spotify user began his collection of surf music with "Miserlou" by the legendary Dick Dale. This song rocks in 4/4ths time with incredibly rapid guitar licks merged upon a heavy drum and bass beat. And that horn! It's a surf music classic. But then the frenetic "Miserlou" is followed by "Maria Elena," and the transition is jarring as it is instructive. Two brothers, Antenor Lima and Natalicio Lima, from the coast of NorthEast Brazil, formed a band called Los Indios Tabajaras. "Maria Elena" is also a classic love ballad south of the equator, but the two brothers grace the song with gentle guitar work, so much so that you can almost feel the breeze coming off of the Atlantic onto Brazilian shores. This placement of frenetic and then slow, quick-paced jamming to evocative plucking may be jarring, but the person who made this list is also instructing his listeners - surf music at its roots pulls influences from south of the border. To make this emphasis stick, the third song is the more familiar "El Conquistador," by The Chantays. This Orange County, California band were heavily influenced by Hispanic music and you can easily hear the tonal references in the intro. The fourth song played is the mega surfer hit "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris. The massive frantic drumbeat is iconic. Taken together, these four collected songs on the Spotify collection "Surf's Up," is curated for effect, instruction, and pure surf pleasure.
Spotify is Curation
The ultimate goal of a curator is to collect resources, bring them together, and create something new. Additionally, by doing so, a curator is imparting new knowledge. Think about the four songs above, most of us are aware of the genre of surf music. But here, the curator made sure you knew about the influences of South of the Border tunes upon the surf music scene.
Further, the curator took the listener's likely familiarity with the surf music genre to make a connection: the influence of Hispanic music is undeniable.
What the curator did here was to create an impression, to impart upon the listener to take surf music as a multicultural outlet.
In collecting, connecting, and creating the curator of these four tunes contextualized the surf music scene, gave background to the surf music. But that context was only possible when taken from multiple sources and from multiple perspectives.
It is obvious the curator of these four surf music songs spent some time contemplating the order, the importance, and the impact that these tunes would have upon the listener.
Reading is Curation, too!
The five "Cs" in bullet form looks like this:
to collect
to connect
to create
to contextualize
to contemplate
Or, as scholar Jenae Cohn puts it, the process of curation is to collect from your readings your notes, to connect this information to what you already know, to create something new and meaningful, to place this meaning in the context of your growth, and to contemplate why these readings are important and where to access additional information for the sheer joy of adding to one's knowledge base.
Cowabunga dudes.