Plenty of people hate Spotify, and for good reasons. But pay disputes aside, the streaming service can be helpful in many ways. When I wrote more about music, there’s no way I could have afforded to buy all the music I had to listen to. Paying my premium gave me access to a world of music that I couldn’t have dreamed of finding on my own.

Now Spotify have added at feature a few weeks ago called “Discover Weekly”. After nearly three weeks, I can safely say that nothing about these playlists help me “discover” much of anything, but I am enjoying seeing what random shit some computer thinks I want to listen to.

The Good:

• Remembering what was forgotten
• Lots and lots of soul

Occasional I tire of my incessant 80’s binge and delve into other realms of music. As of late I have been  attempting to understand the world of soul music. It can be a bit daunting when you have no clue where to start. This is when Spotify is actually helpful. I couldn’t find half of these gems without a computer telling me so. Thanks, whatever does this!

But other than the nice discovery aspect, there’s a lot of non-discovery. I would say over 75% of the songs on these playlists are already songs I know, but it’s pretty fun revisiting things you might have forgotten about otherwise. Most of these for me are in the vein of 70’s Rock because the more I miss home the more I turn into a man in faded jeans and a moustache (basically my dad).

The Bad:

• Abba
• “Afternoon Delight”
• Kenny Loggins/every bland 80’s song you couldn’t even dream were real

It’s obvious that Spotify enjoys making me suffer because of my “questionable” tastes. I listen to lots of disco at times, but never ever ever ever EVER Abba. There’s something really bad about disco without any soul or rhythm. Gaaaah. Those Swedes are everything I hate about music. So glad “Waterloo” could make a special appearance in the first week.

Right, I have a ever-growing playlist of 80’s songs where I like to compile singles and other bits that are likely to escape my brain if I don’t store them somewhere. It’s filled with plenty of questionable choices (we Wisconsinites have questionable taste), but nothing I have ever listened to makes me deserve Kenny Loggins.

There is a lot of shit on these playlists, to say the least. And there’s no way to express your hatred of what they put on them. So Spotify, if you are reading this, I DON’T FUCKING LIKE ABBA.

The Questionable:

• William Shatner “Common People”
• Boys Don’t Cry “I Wanna Be a Cowboy”
• The Promise/When in Rome

I can’t be the only one who can never remember if When in Rome is the band or the song (it’s the band…right?). This song isn’t bad or good by any means, but I absolutely cannot listen to this song anymore without thinking about Napoleon Dynamite – a movie I haven’t seen in over a decade.

But I’ve gotten so many weird 80’s one-hit wonders like “The Promise”. The most astounding would have to be William Shatner’s cover of “Common People”. My husband thought it was incredible. I was horrified that anything in the world thought I could ever possibly enjoy this.

Now that I have a full-time job again for the first time in almost two years, I can finally return to buying more music than I should be allowed. I’ll definitely be using Spotify less, but features like Discover Weekly still make this a pretty fun experiment to look at.