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In the era of streaming music, everyone is a DJ. We are all participants in playlist culture. From the perspective of the work-based musical cultures of the Western tradition, or even the recording-centered monoculture of 20th-century popular music, the new culture of the playlist looks so ephemeral and chaotic that only its most corrosive effects—on musical forms, on money-making strategies, on modes of listening—can be tracked and analyzed. But what if we saw the playlist itself as a newly dominant cultural form?