Ars Technica’s songs of the summer—and how our staff discovers music

Hello from the 2015 Technicon, the annual Ars Technica staff meet-up where we all put on pants, leave our home offices, and gather in a single city to talk about editorial policy and come up with new nicknames for Jon Brodkin.

One major ritual most of us take part in before boarding planes en route to Technicon is to update our portable music playlists, which means this is as good an opportunity as any to whip up a staff-wide music mix for you, dear readers, to shimmy and shake to while reading our other diatribes about mobile phones, hacking, and fancy cars. We asked staffers to contribute one song each and then cooked up a Spotify playlist and added our perspectives on modern music accumulation.

The results and diatribes are below, along with an unexpected double-dose of one artist (we didn't confer with each other before making our individual picks). Also, if you can guess which listed staffer was the major digital-music hold-out before reading, you get a cookie.