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How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

notes.xdavidhu.me

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Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#51

Post by sbarre »

wwfn wrote: post #38
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?

All my monthly playlists and the yearly best-of are public on my profile:

https://open.spotify.com/user/sebastienbarre

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#52

Post by sbarre »

xattt wrote: post #43
wwfn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you share your top-24 anywhere?

I would presume it’s entirely subjective and the significance of each song is encoded in the context of life at that particular time. There were a couple of months this year where my kids wanted to listen to Sesame Street “Letter L” and “The Word is No” while commuting. Hearing those songs on a playlist would remind me whatever was happening, but would have absolutely no significance to you.

Absolutely.. I do this monthly/yearly thing primarily for me. Some of my friends follow along because I listen to a lot of music so I'm sort of a recommendation engine for them, but I never think about that when I am adding stuff to these playlists.

It's purely to recall and revisit what I was personally enjoying at the time.

I don't really connect music to life events though, like if I go back to May 2022 for example I won't listen to those songs and think "oh I remember XYZ about that time"... It will just be re-discovering some music I had perhaps forgotten about, since I listen to a lot of music and can't really remember all of it.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#53

Post by sbarre »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #48
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…

I have one playlist I add songs to I listen to on repeat. Going back through it, it really shows what I was mostly listening to at what time.

Yeah Spotify's "Liked Songs" is that for me.. I just throw stuff in there that I want to keep track of.. I have 3,671 songs in there now so it's not super curated..

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#54

Post by bill_duckduckgo »

I have been doing something similar on Spotify. I've been curating a playlist called "Jam of the Week" and each Thursday, I look back on the week and pick one song that best represents that week. What did I listen to on repeat? What song just dropped that I loved? What song did a friend share with me that I loved? Pick one and add it.

I've been running it for 460 weeks now - almost 9 years of memories. Not every song means something important, but a lot of them bring me right back to the time when I added it and makes me smile. I put the playlist on shuffle when I don't know what to listen to.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#55

Post by nadis »

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…

This is a really simple yet clever system and I may have to give it a try! I've created vibes-based playlists at points-in-time but otherwise just dump everything to my "like" list on Spotify which is fairly poorly organized after so many years.

Re: How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

#56

Post by pcchristie »

xdavidhu wrote: post #17
donkeyboy wrote: post #2

Cool idea. One thing the author might like: if you sign up to lastfm, it tracks all of your music plays. So you can go through the data and see what you were listening yo each month/week

Last.fm is great! I do like the breakdowns you can do there, especially the query for the top songs/artists of the last 30 days, year & all time. It's not as seamless to jump in and listen to stuff on lastfm though.

It's annoying they don't allow migrating in a data dump from Spotify (they do, but everything is tagged as listened to on the day of import...). My Spotify account is 10 years old but I only discovered Last.fm ~ 6 months ago.
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