Yearly Playlists

In early 2018 I was talking to my friend Chelsea about how she curates her Spotify playlists. Chelsea always has amazing playlists and would share her monthly playlists with anyone who wanted them. I didn’t understand how she decided what songs to put on each month’s playlist and then how she picked her tops songs of the year for the yearly playlist in December. The answer was annoyingly simple. Each month she makes a new playlist and adds the songs she’s listening to and loving (both new releases and older songs that are on repeat). At the end of the month she adds that playlist into the larger yearly playlist so in December she has a playlist of her favorite songs of the year.

I loved this idea so much that I used her playlist method last year. Each month I created a new playlist (just titled with the name of the month), at the end of the month I’d add the songs into the year playlist, and then I’d delete the month playlist at the start of the next month. I learned a lot about my music tastes and habits while doing this. For one, I learned that I tend to listen to entire albums of artists that I like, so my monthly playlists were pretty long. Some had multiple entire albums in addition to a few one-off songs. This also means that the yearly playlist was SO LONG. There are 351 songs on my 2018 playlist. Which is truly wild, but they’re all songs that I loved listening to at some point during the year and listening to the playlist brings back memories of when I had each song in heavy rotation. Here’s my 2018 Spotify playlist if you want to take a peek at what I listened to last year.

This year I decided to continue this habit but in a slightly modified way. I cut out the middleman and stopped making monthly playlists. Instead I’m adding songs straight into the new 2019 playlist. It seems that the entire album trend is continuing this year as well. I’m excited to see how this year’s playlist ends up and curious about whether it will be a similar mishmash of genres and styles as last year’s.