Spotify has ruined mood playlists – so our critics have made some better ones instead

Whether made by human hand or shady algorithm, emotion-based playlists are everywhere. But if you’re looking for a superior soundtrack to ‘all the feels’, get your ears round these selections from our music writersMusic might be the greatest mood enhancer in the world: it’s certainly hard to think of another art form that can so effectively tip a feeling of happiness into euphoria or create a suitably gloomy space in which to wallow in melancholy. There have always been albums designed to evoke a certain mood, from Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely to Essential Chill Out Vol 2. But in recent years, we seem to have become more interested in the relationship between music and mood. Streaming services are thick with mood-based playlists. There appear to be hundreds of the things on Spotify, from the straightforward (Happy Vibes) to the vague (All the Feels), and they appear to have struck a nerve: Spotify’s own curated mood playlists are now vastly outnumbered by user-generated ones, soundtracking everything from Friday at the Office to – I swear I’m not making this up – Losing Someone to Suicide.There are those who have detected something sinister in all this. Liz Pelly’s 2025 book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist suggests that the Spotify’s seeming obsession with mood-based playlists is linked to its focus on what it calls “lean-back consumers” – not ardent music fans, but the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling quietly away all day. These playlists, Pelly suggests, exist as a latterday equivalent of muzak, designed to be as unobtrusive, unsurprising and unadventurous as possible, to seamlessly play in the background without really being noticed. Continue reading...