My Playlist: 2020 Q1

As the year starts anew, my music tastes do too.

One of my favorite features of Spotify from the beginning is the ability to have dynamic/collaborative playlists and be able to share those with others. I remember being in my dorm room sending MP3 files to my roommate because we didn't have any other way to do it. The way it's so easy now is almost unbelievable and also easy to forget.

This also beats the pants off of my post-college music flow where I would scour websites looking for the newest music. I would spend hours reading blog posts, downloading songs, downloading the correct cover art and uploading it to services such as Spotify or Google Music to fill in the gaps to get the latest songs.

These days my workflow is much more simple. I generally listen to new playlists (Release Radar, Discover Weekly or a playlist posted to Reddit) in attempts to find and save (or heart) songs that I like. Since Spotify first launched, the Artists do a much better job of getting their music posted in a timely manner. This is a helpful feature - an easy way to make a quick playlist of your favorite songs - but it wasn't good enough for me. What I created was a script that would run every 1/2 hour and create quarterly playlists based on those liked songs and take into consideration previous songs I have liked in the past.

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The script will grab my current liked/hearted/saved playlist (whatever Spotify is calling it this week), search all of my previous quarterly playlists and remove duplicate songs. It will then check to see if a current quarterly playlist has been created (ex. 2020 Q1), create it if it does not exist, add the currently liked songs to this playlist and then finally un-save/like/heart them in Spotify.

This is SUPER helpful, I now have 4 playlists for every year going back to 2010 which reflect my musical interests for those months. I now have to do very little to keep that going (other than making sure my scripts continue to run).

This playlist will continue to grow until the end of March when I'll switch over to 2020 Q2. I generally come back to these playlists at home or in the car because I know that they'll be full of music I enjoy listening to. I do sometimes start to get tired of them near the end of the 3 months, but that just means I haven't been adding enough new music to keep it interesting.

My favorite part is that it also alerts me via the iOS Pushover app that it's found a new song!

Thanks for reading! I can post and discuss the actual scripts in a future post if there is interest!