Frequently
Asked

CrgrsBckr is Craig Becker, a music curator and playlist architect based in Whistler and Vancouver, BC. He builds Spotify playlists the way records used to be made — sequenced deliberately, front to back, with liner notes that give the songs some context. More on the About page.

The Collection is the full archive of CrgrsBckr playlists, presented like a record store rather than a streaming feed. Playlists are pressed, sleeved and shelved into crates — Brand New, The Eras, Madonna, New Now Next, Becker's Beats, Most Recent and The Vault — so you can dig through them by mood and period instead of scrolling one long list. Start digging in Now Playlists.

The Eras are the long-running CRAIGSBECKERMIX collections, built season by season and year by year. Each one captures a specific stretch of time rather than a genre — the songs that were actually in rotation during that period, sequenced in the order they made sense. They are the backbone of the archive and the best place to start if you are new to it.

Yes. Every playlist is a public Spotify playlist and opens straight in Spotify. A free Spotify account plays them on shuffle; a Premium account plays them in the intended running order, which is how they are built to be heard.

Follow the profile on Spotify so new playlists appear in your library as they are published, and follow @crgrsbckr on Instagram for the ones being talked about that week. New arrivals also land in the Brand New crate here.

New playlists go up regularly rather than on a fixed schedule — some weeks bring several, some bring none. The Brand New and Most Recent crates always hold the latest additions, so those are the two worth checking.

The Listening List is the podcast shelf — a short, hand-picked set of shows worth your time, each with a one-line note on why it is there. It is deliberately small. It is a recommendation list, not a directory.

The B-Sides is the blog: liner notes, album reactions, playlist breakdowns and the occasional argument about a record. If a playlist has a story behind it, the story usually ends up there.

Yes — suggestions are welcome by email or on Instagram. Plenty of the collection started as somebody else's recommendation. No promises about what makes the cut, but everything gets listened to.

The site reads your device clock. Between 7am and 7pm you get the daytime look; in the evening it switches to a midnight starfield. There is a toggle in the menu if you prefer one over the other, and your choice is remembered on that device.

A good playlist has a point of view. It is built around a feeling, a place or a stretch of time rather than a genre tag, and every track earns its slot — if a song is only there to pad the runtime, it weakens the whole thing. The test is simple: can you play it start to finish without reaching for skip?

Somewhere between 40 and 70 minutes for most purposes, which is roughly album length and about as long as attention holds. Longer works when the playlist is meant to run in the background — a party, a drive, a shift — but a 200-song playlist is a library, not a record. Build the library separately.

Treat it like an album with two sides. Open with something that sets the tone rather than your biggest song, build through the first third, put the strongest track about two-thirds in, and land somewhere quieter than you started. Pay attention to the joins — key, tempo and energy between consecutive tracks matter more than the quality of any single song.

An algorithm predicts what you will tolerate next based on what you have already played, so it tends to narrow toward the middle of your taste. A curated playlist is somebody making choices — including choices you would not have made — with an order that is meant to be heard as an order. One keeps you comfortable; the other occasionally surprises you.

All eras welcome means no snobbery about release date or chart position — a 1978 deep cut and last month's pop single can sit next to each other if the sequence earns it. No skips is the standard the playlists are held to: if a track is skippable it should not have been included.

Follow curators rather than playlists. A playlist goes stale; a curator keeps making things, and once you find one whose taste overlaps yours, their back catalogue is worth more than any single search result. Check when a playlist was last updated, look at how it is sequenced rather than just the track count, and be suspicious of anything with thousands of songs.