Curious about what playlists influential individuals are grooving to on Spotify? The recently launched Panama Playlists offers a centralized collection showcasing the listening habits of politicians, journalists, and technology leaders, curated by an anonymous source.
Notable figures featured on the site include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, House Speaker Mike Johnson, former US Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Late Night host Seth Meyers. Several individuals whose data appears on the site have verified its accuracy; for example, New York Times journalist Mike Isaac tweeted, “Thankfully mine isn’t too embarrassing.” Spotify did not provide comments ahead of the publication of this report.
“What I’d be way more interested in is what podcasts people like JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt etc are listening to!!”
Included in the list is Vice President JD Vance, whose personal playlist titled “Making Dinner” features songs like “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys and “One Time” by Justin Bieber. A request for comment to Vance’s spokesperson, Taylor Van Kirk, went unanswered.
Journalist Taylor Lorenz also appears on the site with her playlist “Favs,” which includes tracks such as “Take a Bow” by Rihanna and “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits. She confirmed her data’s accuracy, adding in a text conversation, “I mostly use Spotify to listen to podcasts and what I’d be way more interested in is what podcasts people like JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt etc are listening to!!” Joanna Stern, a tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, also verified her information and noted that the creator of the Panama Playlists seems to harbor negative sentiments toward the band Third Eye Blind.
Kara Swisher, another journalist highlighted on the platform, disputed the accuracy of her listed playlist titled “My Peloton Music,” which includes “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion. Swisher suggested that the site might have sourced this information from her wife’s Peloton account. Amanda Katz, Swisher’s wife, refuted this claim, stating that the playlist does not belong to her and remarked, “Trust no one.” Katz speculated that any songs attributed to them might originate from shared Peloton workouts instead.
The creation of this website can be attributed to Spotify’s design, which promotes public sharing and complicates privacy settings. Users must navigate to the “Privacy and social” section and manually adjust the “Public playlists” option to keep their playlists from being public. This adjustment does not retroactively impact previously public playlists; users are required to change the privacy settings manually for each one.
It’s unclear who created the website or how they obtained this data.
Many people use their names for their Spotify logins, likely due to initial sign-ups through Facebook. This accessibility makes it easy to find certain profiles, including that of an Adam Mosseri, whose “Hang” playlist was listed on the Panama Playlists site. Mosseri has not responded to inquiries about the authenticity of this account. Additionally, there are two profiles for Palmer Luckey, one of which, labeled “Palmer Freeman Luckey,” includes a playlist titled “Best Music Ever” that the Panama Playlists had noted as real, which Luckey confirmed on X.
Despite the unclear origins of the website or how it accumulated the data, certain profiles, like that of NBC’s Al Roker, showcase specific song play counts that are not typically visible to the public. It raises questions about whether Roker had his “Listening activity” privacy setting turned on, allowing whoever compiled the data to track his listens, possibly even manually counting each time he streamed a song.
When reviewing privacy settings, staff at Technology News discovered discrepancies, with one editor surprised to find a colleague following her despite her assuming her profile was set to maximum privacy. Collaboration on a playlist allowed this connection without a notification, prompting questions about follower visibility.
Spotify gathers significantly more data than many users are aware of, encompassing search queries, streaming histories, browsing behaviors, interactions with other users, location details, device identifiers, and even insights on how users hold their devices, according to the company’s privacy policy here. Private profiles are not an option; users’ names and photos are consistently visible to anyone they haven’t blocked.
Though the reveal of favorite songs through the “Panama Playlists” may seem trivial, this still raises alarms regarding the trend towards increased surveillance in the digital age. A more serious instance of such privacy neglect in Silicon Valley has prompted discussions around politicians’ public Venmo transactions.
Some details presented were quite specific, such as information on Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer at Meta, who played “Stubborn Love” by The Lumineers immediately after Meta’s significant investment in Scale AI. Wang has not yet commented on this revelation.
Meanwhile, Casey Newton, a former colleague now writing the Platformer newsletter, confirmed his listening activity as well: his top song last year was “All You Children” by Jamie xx and the Avalanches. “Here is my comment: ‘All You Children’ by Jamie [xx and the Avalanches] absolutely slaps,” he remarked, recommending it for summer playlists.
With contributions from Nilay Patel and Sarah Jeong.
