Why Can't I Just Listen to Music Like a Stupid Normal Person
I'm a Millennial in the 2020s, so of course I consume 80+ percent of my music via streaming service (naturally, the other 20% is vinyl snobbery). And like most folks, when I hear a song I decide I might want to listen to ever again, I click the little heart icon to add it to my library where I promptly forget about it for two years until it hits the Shuffle lottery.
Except that's not entirely true. I was actually inspired by an Art of Manliness article (a site that I mostly subscribe to for the comfort of knowing that, should I choose to invest myself, I too could devolve into sweaty, flannel-wearing masculinity. Of course, I will never actually do this as my mustache consists of, at most, five strands of hair) that suggested splitting your music library into different seasons to enrich your listening experience.
Like a dummy, I actually did this. It took more time than I honestly should spend on anything, but I had my entire music library split into four nice, tidy playlists, and I would rotate through them each season.
Would I recommend this? Surprisingly, yes. It was a great way to reduce the fatigue of certain songs popping up all the dang time, and made me less likely to fall into the trap of wanting to skip a song, thus skipping the next ten songs after it because my phone was already in my hand. It felt pretty good.
But maybe it could feel better.
Because if something is worth doing, it's worth overcomplicating.
I mean look, I had bright, bubbly spring songs popping up on cold, rainy April days. I had lazy "dog days of summer" songs coming on as early as June. This was obviously a problem that needed corrected.
At first, I thought about splitting spring and summer into two playlists apiece. This was later stymied by my realization that my fall music would not start until November, at which point I've missed half of the good fall months. My remedy to this was to drop a playlist, combining the late spring and early summer playlists into one, for a total of five. This, of course, is not easily divisible into 12, and I wasn't actually happy combining these two playlists anyway.
So now, my newest idea: TWO sets of playlists, on a staggered schedule, and during the right time of year, I combine the relevant playlist from each set into one big playlist. Here, check out the mock-up I did in Excel (shut up I love Excel):
Right? This thing is genius. I get a more fluid lineup with fewer jarring transitions, and each song still gets a full three months of the year in rotation. Plus, if my mood is leaning one way or the other on a particular day, I just put on the playlist that I want to listen to, rather than the one that contains both.
The downside is I haven't actually listened to music in the past month because I've spent all my time micromanaging my library to get this working. But I guess if I didn't want to spend my time micromanaging I wouldn't be hand-coding this stupid website in HTML.
I will share my results later, unless they're not interesting or if I forget.