A Personal Soundtrack: How Curating Playlists Extend Fictional Worlds
Building a fannish vibe through music
In the summer of 2009, I drove across the country for an internship at a record label. This was before streaming, before Spotify put every song at my fingertips. I had an iPod loaded with my CDs, and admittedly more than a few-cough-downloads. Don’t judge. I asked friends to burn me mix CDs for the drive to the City of Angels. Each one was a window into their world: some punk rock, some pop, some heavy on singer-songwriters. That impulse, handing someone a curated piece of your taste, is the same one driving playlist culture today. Only the format has changed.
Canon Expansion
Director James Gunn’s collaboration with Spotify for his Superman film in the summer of 2025 is a clear example of official canon expansion. In addition to the movie soundtrack, Gunn built out 11 playlists for characters, such as Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Hawkgirl. He thought about them as people, and what they would be listening to. Clark Kent’s playlist is filled with feel-good anthems like Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” while Eve’s is filled with all the girl energy from the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift. Which character has the best taste in music? That’s for you to decide. But in case you were wondering which one is closest to James Gunn’s personal taste–he thinks it’s Lois Lane. While this was all done as marketing for the film, it’s an act of world-building past the runtime of the movie. It adds to the world that didn’t exist before.
While Gunn’s playlists are considered official because they were studio sanctioned, this doesn’t mean fans can’t get in on the action. There is a fan-made playlist “clark kent, superman” that takes the same approach–gather the songs that they think Clark Kent is listening to. While the official playlist clocks in at 38 minutes (this feels reminiscent of the limited nature of a burned CD), this fan decided to make a five-hour-plus playlist for your listening pleasure. That’s a whole lot of time to get inside of Superman’s head.
This same approach can be applied to any fandom. Over here at Rmrk*st, we were inspired to figure out what our favorite Stars Hollow townies would be listening to. Lane Kim might be the music aficionado of Gilmore Girls, but what exactly would Emily Gilmore be listening to on a Friday night? Logan Huntzberger out on a night on the town with the Life & Death Brigade? Sookie St James dancing in the kitchen? We explored 14 characters and each one is quite different.
You can find the same patterns around shows like The O.C. where fans are building out playlists for characters like Seth Cohen and Summer Roberts too.
As fans, we have the power to extend this format to beloved characters and shows that the studio never touched, filling the gap that was left by the source material.
Reorganizing What Already Exists
Unlike the Superman and Gilmore Girls playlists, you can also reshuffle what is already there to bring about new context. That is exactly what Taylor Swift did for her past three album releases. She curated her back catalog into new emotional groupings. Ahead of the 2022 Midnights release, she partnered with Apple Music and made three playlists, based on categories she personally uses for her songs. Fountain Pen songs are diaristic, written like poetry, Quill Pen songs are folkier, old-fashioned tracks, and Glitter Gel Pen songs are the fun ones that don’t take themselves too seriously. When Taylor announced The Tortured Poets Department, fans speculated it was about the five stages of grief. In response, Taylor dropped five official playlists that sorted her existing catalog into the five stages of heartbreak. Most recently, before the release of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor gave her fans the playlist “And, baby, that’s show business.” It served as an easter egg as it was compiled from the songs she previously recorded with producers Max Martin and Shellback. It makes us wonder what she has up her sleeve for her elusive 13th studio album. For those still looking for new ways into the massive Swift catalog, she also curated her songs into Summer and Winter playlists. Across all of these, the content doesn’t change. It is simply a reason to be heard again.
The fan-side version of this same impulse shows up in how listeners handle Swift’s re-recording project. With the Taylor’s Version releases, fans now have two recordings of the same song, the original and the re-recorded master. When Taylor Swift got the rights to all of her masters, at the Remarkist Spotify account we decided to make the “Utterly Unofficial Red” playlist. We blended the original Red album with Red Taylor’s Version, and added some other tracks that were released separately in that era. No new songs or world, just a different lens on the material.
Cataloging for Completion
Instead of interpretation, this primarily is about documentation. The soundtracks released by studios are still a curated collection of songs, not an exhaustive list. For example, Bridgerton’s official Spotify playlist compiles the orchestral pop covers for easy listening. NBC’s This Is Us took a more inventive approach with a “Best Of” playlist, and during the show’s run (2016-2022) they had a playlist generator where fans entered their birthdate to get a custom Spotify playlist of songs released that day, tying the show’s themes of memory and time directly into a personalized listening experience. None of these are complete–they are only official highlights. That gap is where the fan is most likely to step in.
Fans can use tools like Tunefind to track every song in every scene and build that into one long-running playlist, capturing the music an official release wouldn’t bother including. Gilmore Girls is an excellent example of a show that has so many pop culture references. At Rmrk*st, we tracked every band mentioned by Lane Kim and her bandmates. This would make one epic playlist, just saying. We also created “Hep Alien: The Complete Set List.” The fictional band might just be that–fictional–and have no actual recordings, but they covered many songs throughout the run of the show. We can’t listen to the real “Hollaback Girl” and not hear Gil singing it.
Another fan playlist reconstructs Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Throughout the two-year run of the tour, the actual setlist went through changes, but this playlist imagines a version where not one song was ever cut to make room for The Tortured Poets Department. In addition, every surprise song that was available on streaming is also included. The result? Over 15 hours to relive The Eras Tour.
You can find this same completionist instinct across a wide variety of fandoms, ranging from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s documented end-credits songs, to music from The Bronze on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Fallout fans rebuilding in-game radio stations like Galaxy News Radio.
Aesthetics and Vibes
Sometimes the playlist doesn’t care about canon or being complete, but instead it’s all about the vibes. The atmosphere is what makes a show comfortable to revisit. The same rewatchability that draws someone in to watch an episode draws them into a playlist built on the show’s mood. All you need is the right guitar sounds or drum beat to get the feeling back.
Cozy Small-Town/Fall brings us to this Gilmore Girls Fall playlist that has us reaching for the flannel, blankets and pumpkin spice coffee.
80s Retro/Sci-Fi has us all about this Stranger Things playlist. In preparation for Stranger Things 4, Netflix got in on the vibes playlist by creating The Upside Down Playlist and having actor Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas) create a Throwback Thursday playlist of all the 80s songs that helped him get into character.
Period dramas call for the Don Draper Mentality, where you’ll find music from the 60s to pair with your Mad Men rewatch. This playlist definitely calls for an old fashioned to sip on.
Moody Teen & Coming-of-Age… we found the perfect playlist that combines the vibes of all our favorite teen dramas, and we are currently pretending we are in a 2000s TV show. It’s a composite of Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, The O.C., and Smallville. The vibe doesn’t need a single source to be effective. It can construct a whole imagined show out of several real ones, which is its own kind of world-building. Type in anything, and we do mean anything. We found one titled: “2000s surfer mermaid malibu barbie”–now that is specific!
That drive to Los Angeles is long behind me, but the instinct behind those mix CDs never really left. Whether it’s a studio building out a universe, someone reshuffling existing material, cataloging every scene’s soundtrack, or chasing a very specific vibe, the goal is the same one my friends had in 2009: here’s a world, now listen your way into it. Got a favorite show, character, or vibe you want turned into a playlist? Drop it in the comments. No request is too specific. We might just build it next.
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