Tech and music are two business hardly known for being immune to trends, and the playlist push has been met with mixed responses from the news media. “I worry I’m hiking into an unhappy valley of music streaming, where I like more, but love less,” noted The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler recently. Pitchfork contributor Jill Mapes wrote for NPR: “I find myself constantly fighting the inclination to switch the song when I’m using one of these recommenders, be it Pandora, Spotify Radio, Beats Music, or Rdio’s You FM. It all sounds so … same-y.” The New York Times’ Ben Ratliff, after praising playlists created for Tidal by artists including Beyoncé and Usher, called for streaming services to hire “a single person of distinction” and empower that person to pick songs. “That’s where discovery will always lie: In the suggestions of actual human beings,” Ratliff wrote. “Divisions by genre, format, or mood may be arbitrary. Individual people never are.”

Like many music lovers, I’m of two minds when it comes to today’s prominence of playlists. On one hand, I feel like streaming playlists have been a part of my life since the middle-school mixtapes that I can no longer find but still attempt to reassemble virtually. On the other hand, I’m less excited about trying new technology than I am about trying new music, so I’m more likely to trust in a friend or a college radio DJ: “a single person of distinction.”

I’ve been listening more to playlists lately though, partly in a professional capacity and partly because listening to a list of familiar songs as my wife steers our family home on a sweltering Friday night seems like a good idea for keeping everyone awake (even if that means staying awake to a familiar song I thought I never wanted to hear again… OK, fine, it was Matchbox Twenty’s “Push”). For playlists, for curation, it seems not only natural, but essential to take my time deciding if there’s really wheat within all this chaff.

“Each user is also curating the entire history of music,” Apple’s Plagenhoef tells me. “They’re naturally doing that through the limitlessness of choice and the limitlessness of being able to manipulate that choice. Some kind of notion of a playlist is the natural organizing principle and delivery system for it.”

If playlists are how the entire history of music can most naturally be organized, then that history, too, appears to be at a stage of transition. According to Nielsen report released in June, 93% of adults still listen to traditional AM/FM radio at least once a week, and a slightly earlier report found that “radio remains the top source for music discovery.” Is the “new radio” still just radio?

Terrestrial broadcasters and the new online playlisters will no doubt continue to coexist, but the industry is wagering that younger listeners will increasingly curate music’s history more directly. They’ll pick from among the manifold variety of playlists, some curated by professionals, others selected by users like themselves. And they’ll listen both in the places long home to older types of playlists, such as gyms and bars, as well as newer locales enabled by the mobility of smartphones.

But there will be access to more “ultimate mixtapes,” to use Reznor’s phrase, than before, with input from more people: exercise instructors and amateur streamers a world away, along with college radio DJs, Top 40 playlisters, and, yes, Beyoncé. The promise is that, in this new pocket library of nearly infinite playlists, we all, looking together, might find those particular records that mean so much.

And what if most listeners end up finding a bunch of music they “like” rather than “love”—the same old musical comfort food in snazzy new packages? Albums might change their shape, a good festival headliner might get harder to find, but that still wouldn’t be the worst possibility—for music as mass culture, in fact, it might be the same as it ever was. Either way, while “the unhappy valley of music streaming” sure sounds like a bummer of a place, it doesn’t have to be real.

A Google search for “songs about playlists” still comes up empty for me as of press time, but there are countless tracks about predecessors like radio, DJs, and mixtapes. One from a band on Apple Music’s “Artists John Peel Helped Make Famous” playlist is the Smiths’ 1986 indie-pop classic “Panic”, with its sneering refrain, “Hang the blessed DJ, because the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life.” But today’s DJs know much more about our lives—including our tastes, activities, and circumstances—than ever before. Their necks ought to be a bit more precious now.