Slate.com has posted an article about iTunes celebrity playlists . Apparently, celebrities, mostly or maybe entirely musicians, can post playlists of recommended songs on iTunes. Nice marketing technique: I'm sure a lot of people will check out & maybe buy a song just because Beyonce said she liked it.
Slate's shocking revelation is that most of the playlists are bad because bland, corporate musicians listen to (or to be more accurate, want the world to think they listen to) bland, corporate music. But artists who aren't part of the corporate music machine (i.e. Sleater-Kinney) don't. Wow! Who would have guessed that Thievery Corporation's recommended playlist is better than Sheryl Crow's? It's not like Thievery Corporation has any experience with mixing other people's songs together. Not like they're, you know, DJs or anything. But the Slate author seems genuinely surprised that Thievery's mix is so good.
I guess I shouldn't sneer at the article. It seems written for people who, unlike me, don't assume that anything created by Michael Stipe or Sheryl Crow totally sucks. And it did provide the helpful information that these celebrity playlists exist, which I hadn't known.
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I suspect that iTunes got the idea from Starbucks, which has been marketing a line of "Music That's Important to Me/Us" CDs from famous musicians for a while now.