Growing up in the age of Napster and Limewire, I’ve long been fascinated by the change in how we as a culture consume music. My childhood was at the start of the age of the compact disc, where everyone had those big fancy stereo systems with big speakers and everything and now we’re deep into the age of streaming music, where you can hop on Spotify or Pandora or Amazon or Apple and stream whatever music you like.
I’ve written about this before— two blog iterations ago, I set out on a quest to listen to 100 albums, after realizing that in the age of streaming and torrenting, people didn’t have to consume their music in album-sized packages anymore- they could get bite-sized and snag the songs they like and then create as many playlists and they wanted too from there.
What’s changed about my personal consumption of music is that I tend to get fixated on certain songs and playlists far more than I used to- so I end up feeling like I get stuck in a musical rut. I’m not going to pretend to be on the cutting edge of what’s cool, what’s hip and what’s coming up (I remember reading so much about The Mars Volta when I was in college, but never actually listened to a lick of their stuff then and haven’t really explored them too much since. ) But I would like to discover new stuff now and again and the way I’ve been doing that for the past couple of years has been several vain attempts to juice my Spotify algorithm.
Why? Well, because I got tired of hearing the same songs on my ‘YEAR END WRAPPED’ playlist every single year, and well because I want to figure out how to juice it, you know?
Other platforms are pretty easy to sus out: if you’re on Tik-Tok, you watch certain videos on certain topics in their entirety and you’re going to see more of those videos on your feed. The Missus was complaining about her brassieres the other day and now my Facebook feed is full of ads for bras (don’t get me wrong: I’m not going to complain about that!) Twitter, if you mute or add certain accounts (like I did during the process of gathering information for my Court Design round-up), you’ll find yourself flooded with information on similar topics.
The point is, there are ways to do it and I’m not that interested in going all in and drilling down to manipulate any of these on a microscopic level. I just want to learn what buttons to push to juice things up a little bit, you know?
This year, I wanted to be a little more deliberative about my process.
First of all: I’m not on Spotify Premium anymore (and haven’t been for a few years now)- which can be irritating, but I just couldn’t justify spending the money on it and that’s fine. I can live with my six skips, even though it makes manipulating the algorithm a little harder- especially since I swear that it will just know what song I want to hear on any given playlist and do its best to avoid it for as long as possible.
Second of all: I deleted all the songs off of my LIKED SONGS playlist to start fresh. I figured.
Finally, I just picked an artist, found their ‘THIS IS’ playlist (if you’re on Spotify, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Every artist pretty much has one), and then I would listen to them as much as I could for about a week, adding the songs I liked to my LIKED SONGS playlist as I went. So far, these are the artists I’ve listened to so far:
MF Doom
Drive-By Truckers
Jeff Beck (I took a minor detour here, because he died and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and, as it turns out, it was about quite a lot.)
Pantera (I had never listened to a single Pantera song before this year and given the fact that along with the murder of Selena, Dimebag Darrell’s death was an event of note in my youth, I felt like I should give them a try and, I’m sorry, y’all. Heavy metal is just not my thing.)
The Byrds/CSNY (another detour for the passing of David Crosby)
Arcade Fire
The Afghan Whigs
The Postal Service (want to backtrack and give them another go)
Gorillaz
Bleachers
Sturgill Simpson
CAKE (man, do they have a lot of good songs)
Sufjan Stevens
Radiohead (another band from my youth that I just didn’t get into— I think I have a little more appreciation for them now.)
The War On Drugs (an absolute revelation… loved finding this band. Need to and probably will own an album of theirs at some point.)
A weird combo week of the Violent Femmes and Motown Hits (no one in particular, just in general)
The National (My first taste of The National was not great. Very much a ‘the world is a bleak hellscape, prepare to embrace death’ and not in a fun heavy metal vibe either, more of an emo vibe. But then I read a New Yorker article about their ‘sad Dad’ vibe and gave them another go, this time listening to their lyrics, and damn it, they’re good.)
MGMT (I read an article saying that they produced the most innately millennial album, so being a Decrepit Millenial or whatever they call us now, I had to give them a taste— but I’ll be back for more.)
Gordon Lightfoot (another detour for his passing- but I need to go back and give him a proper look. Life was pretty busy at the time.)
Japanese Breakfast (another delightful revelation and their playlist has a couple of excellent covers they’ve done as well.)
So far, I’m sitting at 162 songs. I don’t know how successful this is going to be, but if I build it up so much more over the course of the second quarter of this year and then really start listening to this playlist in the back part of the year it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
I’ll be back later in the year for another update and the final numbers and to see how this all works out for me. In the meantime, if you have any new artists or bands you think I should check out, drop them in the comments and I’ll throw them into the mix!