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Thought Piece

Is Your Spotify Playlist the New Rorschach Test?

October 13 2025 8 Min
SG
Shashank Garg
date October 13, 2025
Many of us are melomaniacs in the wild with music tastes that are carefully curated, with spotify profiles that are meant to be perceived more intently than our routines. We empathise with questions like “Your most listened to artist is Mitski? Are you okay?” “Damn, is that Tupac on your sweatshirt? Very cool.” So on and so forth. Whether we like it or not, we read people’s music choices like inkblots, projecting our own assumptions onto them. For context, the Rorschach inkblot test is a projective psychological test where individuals are invited to share their perception of an abstract inkblot which is interpreted as a reflection of what goes within. Would you not say we’ve come to perceive music similarly? We’re not directly putting our ideas and beliefs out in the world, yet they’re believed to be revealed, all due credits to music platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music which have globalised music like never before.

Music as a Heuristic

mitski songs

We categorise people all the time. One of the latest categories of people, for reference, would be "performative men”. What causes this categorisation? Heuristic is one of the many reasons. Our brain works by creating associations and shortcuts. Unlike the many other things such as clothes or ways of talking, music is harder to fake. If someone loves punk rock, we might assume they’re rebellious. If they’re into classical, we assume sophistication. These are oversimplifications, but they highlight how music becomes a lens for instant judgment.
 

Artists as a Measure of Sensitivity

Songs are vessels for emotion. When we hear someone listening to Radiohead, we may assume they’re gloomy and sad. If we hear someone listening to Kanye West, we assume they’re cool (or probably support fascism, jk?). The truth, however? People’s reasons for listening are varied, sometimes they just like the beat. Yet because music evokes such visceral feelings in us, we assume it reveals the same about others.

Pop Culture as Social Identity

From a social identity theory perspective, music taste often signals group membership. Fandoms like the Swifties or K-pop stans function like in-groups, shaping belonging and collective identity. Associating someone with a genre or artist can therefore trigger assumptions about values, politics, or lifestyle, even if those links are exaggerated by pop culture.
 

In the end,

While we continue to assume music preferences as projections of people’s inner state, there’s good in leaving space for change and knowing that the interpretations can be misleading. Listening to music is an important part of our identities for a lot of us, we associate with certain songs and artists and that’s quite beautiful but it is crucial to maintain that a single playlist, or even multiple for that matter, cannot capture a whole psyche. What a single playlist can do, however, is open a door for conversations, empathy and connection, and that is what we can and should hold on to.