All Wrapped Up: How 2014 Birthed the Wave of Spotify-Core Music

I turned 20 in the summer of 2014. I only mention this to note that this means that I, like many others at that time, was pathologically obsessed with “being cool”: How to become it? How to achieve it? What music should I listen to such that I was undeniably, categorically it? In generations past, this would have meant seeking out your coolest friend and asking them to put together a mixtape for you, or even checking out their iPod Nano (lime green if they were cool) to see what tracks they had on it. But with cassettes, CDs and even iTunes starting to become relics, the move then was to put together a Spotify playlist. And there was no better year for “Spotify-core” music than 2014.

Run The Jewels. Freddie Gibbs. Mac DeMarco. St. Vincent. Perfume Genius. Angel Olsen. FKA Twigs. Alvvays. Dean Blunt. Flying Lotus. Parquet Courts. Protomartyr. All of these artists released albums in 2014. The year was genre-spanning, vibe-cultivating, and crucially, just hazy and fluctuating enough to fit snugly into a slot on the playlists that would come to define your 20s—the decade in which you are most concerned with emanating a nonchalant, hazy, constantly-fluctuating atmosphere of cool. 2014 was the peak for the artists that came to filter through Lorem, License to Chill, The New Alt and other algorithmically-generated playlists that exposed a generation of late millennials to the music that would come to define them. These were the lofi beats you could study to, the soundtracks to “Netflix and Chill,” the background music to days spent on a smoke break (technically 2013, but spiritually 2014) or as a sunbathing animal.

2014 was the tipping point for one of the most important changes in the music industry: consumers going from discovering new music (whether through friends or zines or pure accident) to being recommended new music. These artists perfectly crested the wave of “Spotify-core” music—music fluid enough that songs could exist comfortably on many playlists all at once, with just enough touches from disparate genres to pass as moody or dark or romantic or chill as needed.

That’s not to say that these albums are all mediocre—I love a lot of the artists listed above. But they all share a certain musical tailoring to the millennial generation. A good portion of gigs I’ve seen live were by artists who put out music in 2014; some of them (Parquet Courts, Protomartyr) I’ve seen multiple times. And I can’t pretend to sit here and say that this was because I’m an inherently cool person (I’m not.) The more likely culprit is that, at some point, these artists filtered through a Spotify playlist I was looking at, and from there they became pieces of the fabric of my young adulthood. I’m sure their music wedged itself into a similar headspace as other people my age who were similarly being dictated to by an algorithm that knew exactly how to target a desire to be indie but relatable, to be able to hang but not in a needy way, to be fun but not flaky. “Spotify-core” music soundtracked the development of a young, urbane lifestyle.

Yet despite being so tethered to a generation, the effects of the music of 2014 are still being felt. Artists and albums who were just starting to emerge in this year presaged almost every major musical trend that would appear in the next decade. Combing through the projects released that year, we find the dawn of stan wars (Lana Del Rey releases Ultraviolence, Ariana Grande releases My Everything and Taylor Swift releases 1989), cult fandoms that would one day turn parasocial (Mitski releases Bury Me at Makeout Creek), TikTok revivalism (Alex G releases DSU), and Coachella rap (J. Cole releases 2014 Forest Hills Drive). While those artists were all at various degrees of stardom at this point, it is clear that they were the beneficiaries of the new method of listening to music: their songs being placed by a rapidly-developing algorithm onto the exact “right” playlist to be absorbed by millions of twenty-somethings who were waiting to be told exactly the way in which their taste should stand out.

Now, a decade on from the release of these albums, what does it mean for the people that grew up with them? Mostly, it means that they have had a decade of their lives codified into algorithmic buckets. For better or worse, the questions that tend to define music consumption in the present day find the wording in the vocabulary of the Spotify Algorithm. What type of daylist am I? As of this writing, “‘90s Slowcore Thursday Afternoon.” Am I in the top 1% of Wombo listeners? I am.

The generation that was shaped by 2014’s albums now has a new set of key milestones to confront, with young adulthood being slowly replaced by the looming specter of middle age. And the music from a decade ago has moved with them. It’s more common now to find artists like Perfume Genius or St. Vincent on a Summer Rewind playlist, a Look Back or a ‘10s Indie rather than on the buzzy Spotify collections that, at least in some part, contributed to their original fame. The unfeeling hand of the algorithm puts them one step away from the home page, a purely financial calculation now that their audiences are now in the 26-34 age range and not the forever-marketed-to ages 18-25 demographic.

A common and justified critique of Spotify is that its interface makes it difficult to organically discover new music. Yet, the devil’s bargain of the app is that they already successfully did it once—I still love Protomartyr, Parquet Courts, Alvvays, Flying Lotus, so why should they try and do it again? Algorithmic consumption of music is reliant on the idea that your tastes may evolve, but not change so completely that you won’t always remember the bands that touched your heart at the time when it was most open to new experiences.

In 2014, the perfect mix of technology and the capitalistic need to micro-target consumers combined to launch a generation of artists to new heights. That’s not the fault of the artists of that time—they could never have predicted that the music industry would go in the direction that it has. However, when we think of the music of 2014 and all its attendant mini-trends, the skittering beats (FKA twigs, Aphex Twin, Caribou, Arca) and country-tinged rock (Iceage, Ty Segall), it’s hard to disentangle them from the idea that there was a mysterious technological force insisting that these were the sounds that made sense. To go back to the beginning, what is a playlist but a collection of songs that someone thinks you’ll think are cool? For all of the great music released that year, 2014 is also encapsulated by the move from playlists that I (Dylan) might think are cool to playlists that someone demographically like me (grew up in a big city, likes post-punk, turned 20 in 2014) has a high probability of thinking are cool.

But I turned 30 a couple of weeks ago. For years, my Twitter header has been a screenshot of one of those music profile data miners that went viral at some point. It says that music for me peaked when Warpaint made “Whiteout” (2016, but the band did put out their self-titled album in 2014). Perhaps that is the legacy of this wave of music. Just as it did for our parents and their parents before them, our tastes have coalesced into whatever we were listening to when our surroundings felt most vibrant and alive with possibility—only ours happened to be tinged with the background presence of an algorithm dictating what sounded vibrant. Even as it broadened our horizons and foresaw every major trend of the decade to come, 2014 also predicted the increased focus on corporate synergy and what plays well on playlists. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do actually want to go listen to some ‘90s slowcore.