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How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

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Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#31

Post by rurban »

I do more, with real physical offline archives for every year, without Spotify premium. Since 2008 or so. I download all of my Best of YEAR songs with one of the Spotify archivers into a playlist (there's one online service also), copy those list to my phone and got the archive. Holes are filled with YouTube rippers.

I've worked as music editor of a local private radio and there I collected tons of songs after getting rid of my huge and expensive LP archive. Even KTRU allows now digital, they were LP-only for decades.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#32

Post by vvoyer »

JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #26

I do something slightly different. I create a new playlist every month, sometimes songs carry over from the previous month, sometimes not. New songs come in, old songs go out. I can go back to any month since late 2011 and see what I was listening to at the time.

I do the same, I named them “SelecTunes YYMM” and been doing it since 2018

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#33

Post by namenumber »

Seems I'm not the only person doing something like this then.

Personally i started a "To Remember" playlist in about 2009 and have been adding every single track I've liked enough since to said playlist. By now its 4127 songs!

With the timestamps its a great way to relive past periods of my life, and also I can put it on shuffle and get the soundtrack of my life. Been a great boon in my life for a very long time.

Also, to keep track of albums I've listened to i keep a "Where I've Been" list where the first track of every album I've listened to in its entirety goes. Its a small way to fight the ephemerality of listening to an album in the digital environment.

I actually i scrolled through the entire list just two days ago and bathed in the memories, was fun to see all the places I had been and forgotten about.

I really do miss having a rack of CDs to let my eyes float over for the memories, and the digital "equivalent" is a brittle substitute, but it has enhanced my life in many ways so I've come to accept the tradeoff.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#34

Post by jphorism »

Cool to see that it pays off to have split things up by season!

having worked on the AI Playlist feature at Spotify (which is agentic) -- one thing you can try to prompt is "give me songs that sound from my .

An extension of this is "give me a sequence of N tracks from each of that all evoke ". Could be a fun prompt to play with

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#36

Post by sbarre »

I have a similar system but it's a bit more ongoing.

Since March 2018 I've created a new playlist "[Month Year]" on the 1st of every month, and every time I listen to a song I enjoy (whether it's new or old or whatever - no rules) I add it to that month's playlist. In fact the only "rule" is to never remove a song once it's added.

Then at the end of the year I make 24-song a "Best of [Year]" playlist where I go back and pick 2 songs from each month, in no particular order, to sum up my year in music.

This tends to reflect my music enjoyment (vs listening) much better than Spotify Wrapped, which over-indexes on music I listen to at work or in the car (when I'm often not really paying attention).

I just crossed 100 months back in November or December, and I have to say it's pretty fun to go back and check out a given month/year in the past (much like the author) and revisit what I was into at the time.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#37

Post by ghostpepper »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #29

>To maintain the integrity & not override the memories associated with specific songs, I rarely listen to or re-save songs from the past years. Sometimes I give myself exceptions, though, especially with remixes. ;) I listen to music as a form of enjoyment, and I can't imagine restricting the music I listen to arbitrarily, for seemingly no gain. To each their own, but it's hard for me to understand how this is making…

I can sort of understand this. There are certain songs, eg. a song from my wedding, that hit like a (good) ton of bricks every time I hear them, but I wouldn't want to listen to it every day because I feel like I would have more and more banal experiences cumulatively associating with the song until the wedding feeling becomes just one of many and starts to lose its association.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#38

Post by wwfn »

sbarre wrote: post #36

I have a similar system but it's a bit more ongoing. Since March 2018 I've created a new playlist "[Month Year]" on the 1st of every month, and every time I listen to a song I enjoy (whether it's new or old or whatever - no rules) I add it to that month's playlist. In fact the only "rule" is to never remove a song once it's added. Then at the end of the year I make 24-song a "Best of [Year]" playlist where I go back…

do you share your top-24 anywhere?

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#39

Post by nipperkinfeet »

For me, Spotify is only for discovery. I've been collecting MP3s of my favorite tracks for over 25 years, long before streaming became popular, and I still do it today. I organize my collection by the year each track was created using a folder structure on my hard drive instead of playlists, and it's all stored locally. I could go even further with this amazing software called MP3tag. Audio Dedupe is great at finding duplicates.
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