My Spotify Top Songs 2020 for your listening pleasure. I’d love to know more about the specific algorithms here – there are some surprising choices and sequencing. But it’s often pleasing (Low into Strauss, Cat People into Little Fluffy Clouds…) Here’s a good piece on Spotify ML generally. I frequently suggest to colleagues in Swedish innovation policy/industrial policy/government contexts that Spotify is the best example of everyday AI/ML around – often to little interest, it should be noted. I also note that Cat People is in my auto-generated 2020 playlist twice (Bowie recorded multiple versions). That’s the kind of thorny music metadata problem I pointed to back in 2005, and which is still incredibly tricky to resolve via automation.

For a more hand-turned playlist from 2020, here’s another nod to my Music for Slowdown set, produced to accompany you reading the Slowdown Papers.