I must start by acknowledging that Playlist in a Bottle, Spotify’s latest proposal, seems to me to be a really creative, original and successful idea. Time capsules have enjoyed a certain popularity for years now and sometimes gain visibility for all kinds of reasons. We were recently able to see it with the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which generated a movement on a global scale of people saving some representative elements of our times so that they can be recovered by those who follow us in the future.
As a general rule, when we talk about a time capsule we think of a container that will house objects and/or messages inside, and that has been designed to be discovered by other people in the future, but… what prevents a capsule from of time is digital? And who says that their recipients must necessarily be other people? Someone at the Spotify offices must have asked both questions, and the answer to them is the genesis of Playlist in a Bottle.
As you have surely already deduced, since we are talking about Spotify, it is evident that the content of the time capsule is music, specifically a personal selection that each user must make by responding to a series of choices that the service offers us and to which you will have to answer to compose this playlist. You will find queries of the type “A song you’re going to kiss someone with this year”, “A song that reminds you of your favorite person” Y “A song you need to hear live in 2023”.
As you can see, part of the questions are related to the year that we just started a few days ago. And because? Because as we can read on the company’s blog, these time capsules are designed to be open in January 2024. And by whom? I bet you’ve guessed it too: by yourself. In this way, in twelve months from this moment, if you decide to make your Playlist in a Bottle, you will find a musical message from your past self, which will allow you to look back and see if your plans have been fulfilled. or yes, on the contrary, nothing has been, for better or for worse, as you expected.
So that everyone can create their own musical time capsule, Spotify offers this function in both premium and free accounts and, yes, there is a deadline to create it, which covers the entire month of January. It is not possible, however, to do so either in the web version of the service or in the apps for desktop systems. Instead you will have to use the app for Android or iOS. Also there is no direct access to it in their interfaces. Instead you will have to access https://spotify.com/playlistinabottle from your mobile browser and, when asked for authorization to do so, open the Spotify client from there. From that moment on, a wizard will be displayed that will guide you, step by step, in the creation of your time capsule playlist.
