Tag Archives: Starbucks

A Midwinter Playlist

I made a playlist today for midwinter. It’s a good one for admiring the rain, drinking coffee, and thinking about crawling back into bed.

If you don’t have Apple Music to open that playlist and want to use your streaming service of choice, here’s the list:

Bon Iver, “Blindsided”
Slime, “My Company”
Sufjan Stevens, “Chicago”
Steve Reich, “Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast” (performed by Pat Metheny)
Balo, “All the Idiots”
Jamie xx, “Sleep Sound”
Etta James, “Fool That I Am”
Radiohead, “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi”
Björk, “Hidden Place”
Sigur Rós, “Untitled 3”
FKA Twigs, “Two Weeks”
Sylvan Esso, “Coffee”

Enjoy!

Spotify+Starbucks

I’m late to the party on this, but Starbucks somewhat-recently announced that they’re teaming up with Spotify to do in-store playlists. From the looks of it, Starbucks is doing branded playlists on Spotify, and baristas can change their store’s music on the fly.

I wish this kind of development had been available when I worked retail in high school and college. We would get so sick of the music, which was usually on a loop of 3 or 8 hours (depending on the corporation). It rendered more than a few songs completely un-listenable to me.

It seems like Starbucks has always had a pretty good understanding of music’s role in creating an inviting atmosphere. I have a soft spot for their music selection because the first time I heard my friend’s band Bon Iver “in the wild” was in a Starbucks.