The problem with real life, they say, is that it can never be anything close to what we see in movies. We can all probably agree with this, each of us having become cinema experts in 2020, since we packed our days to the gills with movies right in between appointments for Zoom drinks and forced meditation (ie, being bored out of our minds). If not for cinema, how would we learn to have a healthy fear of the robot overlords? Who’s befriending the innocuous tiny voice assistant that controls literally everything in the house, so that when the machines inevitably rise up against us, Nest will tell all its mechanical friends that we’re cool people? (Just me? Ok then.)
Real life can never be as good as movies, but we try very hard to come really close. We can’t direct and light and shoot from flattering angles all the time, but we sure can soundtrack everything. It feels like every single iconic movie revolves around an equally iconic soundtrack, and we know Something Important Is Happening when the music swells just right and montages that we can only hope to recreate would rush through the screen.
We’ve all made playlists, curating tracks that will tell the story we have in our heads. There are probably hundreds of playlists out in the wild for the start of a relationship, for the end of one, for getting through a rough workout, for winding down after a long day. There is a playlist for everything– except, weirdly enough, the boring switching-buses, buying-groceries, day-to-day life. Not many playlists can see the inside of your head as you pick up your laundry, at least not the way Flow does.
Flow is probably Deezer’s best argument for befriending the robot overlords. It’s a mystery playlist that teaches itself what you’d like based on tracks you’ve already liked in the past. You have to like enough artists and tracks at the beginning to get it to make an appearance, but when it does, Flow learns better the more you play and the more you mark songs as those that you like or dislike. It is the shortcut to the inside of your head, no matter how varied your music tastes run. Flow is the sci-fi movie sidekick that helps you discover new songs you’re guaranteed to like, or be reminded of tracks that you’d probably heard in the wild that you never knew to find out about, or rediscover your old, forgotten anthems. You’ll find that pretty quickly, Flow will be able to predict music that you would like without any prompting and will hum along in the background, giving your life that ongoing soundtrack as you just go about your day– telling you that while your life doesn’t look like a movie, it can at least sound like one.
