Playlist Paranoia

In the old days your car had a radio. You listened to whatever the Radio One DJ thought was hot. Whilst not always good news musically this did have the advantage that no effort was involved on your part.

Then we all got tape players in cars. So now we could buy musicassettes or, better yet, make up mix tapes from records that we own.

Now we all have hard disk jukeboxes which hold all our records and we can take to the road with several hundred albums. And we can build playlists, the 21st century equivalent of the "mix tape". The bad news of course is that we are now totally responsible for the music that we play in our cars. If you give anyone a lift you end up obsessing over whether or not they'll like that Bjork track that you thought was rather cool some time back, or get your post ironic David Bowie tracks....

Me, I've now reached the point where if I have company I just whack Radio 4 on....