In 2024, Spotify Executive Chairman Daniel Ek shared on LinkedIn that the streaming platform hosts over 8 billion user-curated playlists. For many listeners, playlists serve as more than a collection of songs — they can also capture emotions, reflect personal identities and build connections. That culture of music-driven connection is visible in Isla Vista, where music is woven into everyday life.

“If you're a musician here, you have such an incredible platform to share your music and to perform in front of people,” Siena Waldman, UC Santa Barbara alum and singer and guitarist of Medea’s Children, said.

An analysis of 193 public Spotify playlists mentioning either “Isla Vista” or “UCSB” in the title found more than 8,700 unique songs spanning over 3,300 artists, 1,693 genres and roughly 530 hours of music. For bands writing in I.V., that range shows how one place can inspire many different moods and sounds, with the ocean often serving as a shared emotional backdrop.

“The ocean definitely ties into a lot of people’s music across different genres,” Waldman said.

For many students, I.V.’s music scene reflects the town itself: beachside, energetic and constantly changing. Local musicians also describe a culture influenced by live performance and student creativity.

Guitarist and fourth-year statistics and data science major Sahand Shafieha, who performs with his band, Dielectric, noted that audiences’ willingness to show up makes room for a wide range of sounds.

“When people go to band shows here, I would say it’s not just about the particular music that they’re interested in,” Shafieha said. “It’s also about just going there to see a band play.”

Waldman echoed this sentiment, mentioning that her band plays music that resonates with them, preferring to appeal to a specific niche where their music will strike a chord.

“We’re writing and playing the kind of music that we want to play, and kind of hoping that there’s an audience out there for it,” Waldman said. “By pushing that sort of music and saying that that’s what we’re about, it attracts the people who are into that and who would want to come see that.”

Bands form, graduate and leave, but the culture continues through the students who inherit those sounds, spaces and memories.

“I do like to think that there is enough overlap between one class and the next that aspects of musical identity can be shared and continue,” associate professor of music theory Benjamin Levy said. “That the baton is passed from one group to the next.”

Each new class makes their own bands, house shows and playlists. In this practice, the class can preserve some of the old while also creating something new.

“There’s a constant flow of new ears and new voices into the community that are always remaking the scene,” associate professor of ethnomusicology David Novak added.

Across I.V., students outside formal music programs are building their own stages through bands and performances that spill into the broader Santa Barbara scene. Professor of ethnomusicology Timothy Cooley said he has seen that culture firsthand among his own students.

“A lot of my students are not in the music department, specifically. They have bands, and I see them around Santa Barbara, I see them around in the broader county, I see them at festivals,” Cooley said.

Playlists offer another record of that participation. They show how students shape I.V.’s music culture not only by performing, but by replaying and sharing the songs they attach to the place.

“You are likely to get people contributing to a playlist who might not be the most likely to let their voices be heard in an ethnographic study,” Levy said. “You might get more voices and different ones who are willing to contribute in this way.”

While streaming services and playlists have influenced how students discover and connect to music, I.V.’s evolving music culture is predominantly maintained by in-person connection. Playlists may capture what students listen to, but live performances show how songs become part of a shared local identity.

“What people listen to online is not the same as what they listen to live, and a lot of the associations between place and musical identity occur in the space of live performance,” Novak said.

In I.V., music exists beyond headphones and playlists – it lives in crowded living rooms and front-yard concerts, and it becomes part of how students find themselves, find each other and remember the place.

“It’s having this place to develop your identity as you are becoming an adult,” Cooley said.