I think 2023 is going to be the year that I get into making playlists in a big way, but I’m struggling a bit for ideas. My current system is rudimentary at best:
Hoying random songs into Spotify’s liked songs/green heart playlist (this is already becoming quite unwieldy and disorganised)
Playlist of my favourite albums that I like listening to in full (can also see this becoming unwieldy when I eventually start filling it up)
Artist-specific playlists
What kind of playlists do you have? Genre? Year/decade? Mood-related ones?
Feel free to share specific playlists that you’re proud of, but I’m particularly interested in what types of playlist you’ve got.
I do a monthly playlist of music I like, added in the order that I listen to it. I’ve done this for about 4 years. It can be quite an interesting story of the month looking back.
Mine are mostly by year/decade with a few genre ones
Recently I think it was @guntrip tweeted about doing a playlist where you add one song every day so I’ve started doing that for this year as just a catch all what I’m listening to kind of thing.
I’ve got a lot of best ofs - I like to do a back-to-front discography run for an artist and chuck all my faves into a playlist. Then do the same thing again sometime later and see if it changes.
Got loads based on mood/vibe/genre. I do annual best ofs. Quite like making specific soundtracks for roadtrips or long walks or just for cooking sessions or bath times. It’s fun to return to them after a while and see where my head was at and maybe be reminded of stuff I’d forgotten.
This is why I can’t leave spotify. I’ve playlisted myself into an unethical music prison.
I haven’t met a fun hobby I couldn’t turn into tedious busywork so it looks like this atm:
2023 - An Apple music smart playlist of music released this year (11 releases at the moment) Love - A smart playlist of all the tracks in my library I clicked the little heart on. I don’t know why Apple doesn’t make this playlist automatically, but whatev. 2023 bc - Back catalogues of artists I follow who have confirmed new releases for 2023. A) New - Music new to me in general to check out B) New Releases - Specifically new releases by artists I follow. Anything that catches my eye from the weekly new release thread goes in here. My Shazam Tracks - My Shazam Tracks Phone - A playlist for organising and picking/choosing what music I want downloaded onto my phone for offline listening and pretending I still have an iPod. This would be a mix of new stuff, old favourites, artists I want to revisit or explore more of their discography, etc.
Tunes - I put any song that makes me go mmmm in here, whether it’s old or new, by an artist I follow or not, and then when it gets to a certain point I’ll make themed 2-hour long playlists that go into my 2023 Playlists folder.This is one that’s Death Metal themed and another that’s ambient and so on. I’m up to 7 so far in 2023. I had 60 in 2022 and it’s a neat little audio diary and I’ve experimented a couple of times, including one where it was designed to be exactly the length of my working day with chapters and reasonable transitions and so on.
Along with the 2023 playlist folder, I have an Archive folder where I keep my 2022 playlists, 2022 Release tracker and my top 50 of 2022 playlist. I got Apple Music last year so this will expand as it goes on.
The Albums but better folder has playlists where I change the tracklists of albums that are too long/inconsistent or whatever.
The Decades folder is a set of smart playlists collecting releases in my library from the 50s through to the 2020s to help remind myself how ignorant I am of music before I was born
I have a habit of overwhelming myself and turning what should be fun into work but I’ve gotten better at it since leaving Spotify and intend to make more that are just fun. I had a big Spotify one that was just tracks with great drums I wanna do over from scratch and I could do similar ones too.
Here is the masterlist. Every song I’ve loved since the year I was born. It was done during COVID so it needs updating, but this is effectively my life’s work
Monthly discoveries
Big one that just says ‘sort this’ which will never be sorted as it’s 34 hrs long
Running playlists
Ones for parties
One for holidays
‘Ambient baby’ for when baby was born / wind down time
Sometimes I’ll like songs if I remember to, sometimes I’ll make a playlist for a festival I’m going to or a party I’m having. But normally I rely on chaos and algorithms for deciding what to listen to.
nothing but respect for this level of commitment. feel like I can’t credibly call my handful-of-playlists-and-sticky-notes system a “system” in comparison
I’ve started doing this fairly recently and have been really enjoying it. I’ve got time to burn to listen to music when WFH and it also means I’m not really arsed if I listen to something that I don’t enjoy that much - whereas I’d be more upset if I wasted my free time listening to something that isn’t very good.
Love a playlist. I tend to stick to my own “best ofs” for artists. Never crossed my mind to do a monthly sort of thing, but will start now!
I have tons but I’ll just mention the ones I feel work particularly well:
Charlie XCX mega playlist - Reverse chronological order. Every release with no filler. 4 hours.
SOPHIE Forever Infinity Mix - A playlist of all the unreleased stuff from across the years. I spent months getting all of it. It’s pretty lengthy at 1 hour 45 but I think I’ve paced it well and can happily listen to it start to finish. I do feel a bit mixed about digging around for unreleased stuff but it doesn’t seem like any of this material will be out there anytime soon.
Chromatics’ Dear Tommy - Like I mentioned in the Chromatics thread, the closest you can probably get to what this would have been.
King of Limbs with those 4 tracks they released as double A sides afterwards - This is probably my favourite Radiohead ‘thing’. Wish this had been the official release, but what do I know.
Brothel - One of my favourite artists but it’s nearly all singles, and a lot of them are very similar. This 50 minutes of his best stuff is what I listened to the most in 2022.
The only regular playlist I listen to that has different artists is “City Night Walk” which is a bunch of synthy, hazy electronica. Really good for… going on a walk at night, ideally while a little bit stoned.
many years ago I was on a stag do and the stag’s brother had one monster playlist, the Sick Tunes playlist
inspired by that I created Sick Tunez By Me which contains all the random things I like, other than classical music which has its own playlist
for a while I’ve been meaning to go through Sick Tunez By Me and split it into a few playlists that are more specific, cos if I put Sick Tunez on random, no one else is happy due to the random combination of brutal heavy metal, electronic stuff, very commercial pop, emo, etc.
whereas if I had eg. a Sick Tunez commerical pop playlist I could put it on at parties and people l would likely be ok with it etc,
Only playlists I listen to are ones that I’ve made of artists non album songs so I have them all in one place.
I don’t normally like listening to playlists with lots of different acts because I nearly always listen to one song and then think “I’ll just listen to the album this is on instead”
