Storytelling with Playlists
List the scenes of your play as songs, videos, pictures, blog posts or tweets. Usually a playlist is a list of songs sequenced in a specific order. Videos can also be playlisted too, with platforms like YouTube offering similar functionality to music playing services.
Many of us create and share playlists all the time. The concept behind playlisting is similar to that of DJing in terms of the importance of choice of selection and order of sequence. Whereas DJs react to the moment, however, playing tracks that the audience will respond to live, those making up a playlist (radio DJs or programmers, schedulers or any fan making up a mixtape) can consider the journey the songs take the listener on, or videos take the viewer on, for that matter.
Thinking about playlists in terms of the way we use the web today, RSS is a kind of playlisting tool. Used to syndicate most social media content (blogs, podcasts, tweets, photostreams, video channels and so on), RSS can be used to tell a story comprised of episodes.
I recently wrote a piece for HubPages about social media storytelling in which I refer to an episodic interactive audiobook project streamed through Spotify by the band Hurts, in collaboration with writer Joe Stretch and actor Anna Friel. I compared that project with a nonlinear web video play produced by digital media artists Fifty Nine called Sweet Fanny Adams in Hypertext Eden, a project on which Inner Ear consulted.
Both of these projects have an interactive, nonlinear approach to storytelling. I think there's great potential to explore this style of storytelling further using social media services and playlists. Here's the outline on an example plan for telling a story with crowd sourced content:
- Choose a theme for a playlist
- Announce the theme via your blog, Facebook page and Twitter
- Invite people to add tunes (or videos, photos or other media) to a collaborative Spotify playlist
- Hold discussions on your blog or Facebook page about the best way to order the items
- Share the playlist and promote it as a story
- Inspire others to do the same, or create complimentary artwork to accompany it
This kind of idea can be used in social media marketing campaigns, as I suggest in the socialised content communication piece I wrote for The Drum magazine's Knowledge Bank.
Having made playlists for our alternative music internet radio station Radio Magnetic for years, we, at Inner Ear, are very interested in their potential power for setting the scene, creating, and changing, moods and sharing stories. Playlists need not be just music, but even those which are a simple sequence of songs can become far more than a soundtrack and take on the communication of the story itself.
We will continue to explore ideas on, and uses for, storytelling with playlists and welcome any comments, questions or suggestions.
