UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

Starting in 2020, the rise of the “aesthetic,” music playlist (playlists that appealed to a particular aesthetic or theme) had skyrocketed on Youtube. From referencing studies about the effects of isolation and creativity to directly analyzing the musical playlists themselves, this paper examines the growing trend of aesthetic playlists on social media by identifying how particular combinations of songs evoke certain creative or emotional expressions as well as what those expressions mean to the listeners in an online community. While lacking a definite or singular reason as to why it had sprung into popularity, multiple studies lend evidence to the theory that the COVID-19 lockdowns had stripped away socializing opportunities with peers and friends during key stages of development, leaving ample room and need to develop other means of sharing sentiments via online internet; aesthetic playlists thus have become a new medium of universalizing a creative effort to engage in a vague, self-written and often self-serving story with others in order to cope with the loneliness that followed months of solitude. Additionally, this paper provides an inspection of how the youth adjusts to mass trauma in the modern day.

Keywords: musical aesthetic, isolation, romanticization of solitude, social media, music therapy