About

The story behind the service

It began sometime in early 2018. Music played all day back then, especially to and from work, but also at work. The routine was simple: find a playlist that fit the mood, wear it out over a few days, get tired of it, then go hunting for a new one to "play to death" until that one wore thin too. This went on for a while, until Spotify turned out to have its own API, which meant playlists could be built automatically.

APIs and PowerShell scripts were already daily tools at my day job for automating repetitive tasks, so the same approach could solve this spare-time problem. Better still, the playlist could be made to rotate, with new tracks replacing old ones, so the same list would get stale far less often.

But where would the inspiration for new tracks come from, without leaning on Spotify's own sources? Those tend to be built around the major labels and their marketing rather than genuinely good music people actually listen to. That question quickly became the important one: where and how do you find out what people really listen to and like? The word "like" eventually brought Reddit to mind, where people share content and vote on each other's posts. In other words, a perfect platform to base an automatic playlist on. A little research turned up that Reddit also had an open API, so it was just a matter of connecting the two.

The first target was the subreddit r/listentothis, which had (and surely still has) an active community that often shared tracks. Digging in surfaced something new: Reddit has weekly top lists of the most popular posts from that week, a perfect foundation for a playlist. The most common title format soon stood out too, "Artist - Track". That made it possible to use Spotify's search via its API and check whether the track found genuinely matched the post title before adding it to the playlist.

After plenty of trial and error, it finally worked! That first Spotify playlist, based on the week's most-upvoted posts from r/listentothis, produced music that didn't suit my taste at all! Hahaha. The result was a real letdown at first, after all that work learning the basics of Spotify's and Reddit's APIs. But once the sulking passed came the realisation: Reddit had loads of subreddits, across every music genre and niche imaginable. Why not turn the whole thing into a bigger machine and dedicate a weekly playlist to every major music subreddit? That would mean plenty of playlists to work through and new styles to discover. Back then a free Spotify account could still use the API exactly like a paid one, so a new free account went up, dedicated to these dynamic playlists.

A lot of effort went into finding the best way to parse the post titles. With many subreddits in the mix the format varied, and irrelevant extra text sometimes had to be stripped out to improve the odds of matching the right artist and track. Here oEmbed proved a huge help: YouTube posts, for instance, often had titles that were impossible to parse directly, but oEmbed gave another route to the right answer.

How the name Listige came about

With a solid foundation in place and launch approaching, the service needed a name. "Listige" won out, a blend of the Swedish lista (both "playlist" and Reddit's top "lists") and prestige (a nod to posts that get voted up enough to reach a subreddit's own weekly list). It was always pronounced the English way, so it took at least a year to notice that in my native Swedish the name literally reads as "the cunning one" (den listige).

Running around the clock, and reaching Reddit's users

Running the service around the clock without leaving a personal computer on was another hurdle. Luckily, an online service already in use at the time happened to offer a simple VPS as an add-on, which solved the next problem nicely. Checking for new tracks often, meaning every hour on the hour (as the service has done since 2018), needs something that stays up 24/7 and keeps the playlists continuously fresh, and the VPS was exactly that.

With the technical side sorted, Reddit's users needed to know the service existed. That led to a commenting feature, tied to the account u/Listige, which left a small notifying comment on the post where each added track was found.

Bothering people unnecessarily was never the goal, so every subreddit that got a playlist came with a message to its moderators first, asking whether that kind of bot comment was okay. Where moderators said no, their posts were left uncommented, though the playlist for that subreddit stayed, since the aim was coverage of essentially every musical subreddit with an active community.

Individual users can opt out too. Anyone who sends a Reddit private message to u/Listige with the subject "No more comments" is added automatically to an ignore list, and users on that list never receive another comment from the bot.

From an idea in early 2018, through development, to launch in August that same year, that is how Listige was born: dedicated Spotify playlists based on subreddits' weekly top lists.

From Twitter to Bluesky

In 2020, during the coronavirus and quarantine era of endless working from home, the walls started to close in, as they did for plenty of people. Listige on Reddit was working well, and a thought crept in: could the same idea work on another social platform? Mostly a question of whether it was possible, and a way to keep the mind busy through a dreary stretch. A bit of research made Twitter the natural choice. Like Reddit, it was a very popular platform with (back then) a generous and open API.

Understanding how people actually used tweets took a while, but eventually the shape of a Spotify playlist emerged. The method: users post tweets to a dedicated Twitter bot, @realListige, which in turn curates a Spotify playlist. The foundation came together fairly quickly. But what good is a brand-new bot with a playlist nobody knows about? Plenty of features followed to reach the users who tended to post Spotify tracks. The most interested people turned out to be independent indie musicians after more listeners for their songs. The result was a dedicated, rotating playlist driven by what Twitter users tweeted to the bot.

Quarantine dragged on and boredom set in, so more playlists kept coming. One keyed off a track's release date: anything from the last 30 days landed on a "#newmusic" playlist. Adding a specific hashtag to a tweet could also route the track to a genre-specific playlist. That decision earned quick regret, since users and I didn't always agree on which tracks actually fit a genre. The friction prompted some experiments with the Spotify API's (now discontinued) "audio features" function, which didn't go especially well either.

After a fairly popular run between 2020 and sometime in 2022, the bot's visibility started to fade. Something shifted in Twitter's algorithm, and the number of submitted tracks dropped. Later that year Musk bought Twitter, and maybe six months on the API went paid, which forced the whole project to shut down. By then it had grown far more complicated than it needed to be anyway.

That dull end for the Twitter bot stung. So the Twitter clone Bluesky, steadily gaining attention, was an intriguing sight when it first turned up.

Bluesky felt like a comeback: a chance to finally nail a really good flow for an automatically curated, post-driven Spotify playlist. This bot came together much faster than the previous two, partly thanks to hard-won experience and a clear sense of what to keep and what to avoid, and partly because AI could now assist with development. With that help, a first version was ready in just two weeks. On New Year's Eve 2023 the bot @listigeplaylists finally went live, with a few rules (which you can read more about on the Bluesky page) to keep the playlist's tracks as varied and entertaining as possible.