Mainly aimed at those who use Spotify, Tidal, or any other streaming service like myself, but those who pirate music should still feel free to answer!
How do you organise your music library? Creating playlists is pure torture, in my opinion, because there are so many songs that overlap in genres. I've tried creating lists based on genres, but I'm the type of person to listen to multiple genres in one session so the switching between playlists kinda becomes inconvenient. Same with based on mood, I can still listen to discoesque or fast-paced songs when I'm feeling sad.
Genuinely considered hiring somebody to create the playlists for me, lol. I know having 800 songs in one list is clunky, but having everything in the same spot is a source of relief. Ugh.
Vibe, and purpose. I have a gym playlist full of metal, 90's rap, and some bebop. I also have a playlist for rock, another for metal, a classical playlist, a medievalish playlist (think Danheim, Heilung, The HU, etc), and another for just jazz. I also have playlists for the decades spanning from the 50's to the 90's. Ended up doing playlists for whenever I'm feeling really good, and for whenever I'm down in the dumps, just in case.
The decades playlists really help with being handed the aux. Most people don't do well going from Toto or Green Day to Messhuggah and Opeth, so, dividing a genre by decade is good. I know my grandma will not vibe with Polyphia, so I play her some latin music, classical, or jazz, and she's fine with it.
This leads to many, many playlists, and there's a lot of overlap, but I don't really mind as long as I can make sure I have a playlist for any mood I might find myself in.
Now that I think about it, using a website that could gain access to your playlist and move around the different songs to new playlists (based on genre/mood/etc) would be a godsend...
I have a few playlists that are accompaniments to particular stories/pieces of media. Basically playlists with a narrative they follow. Those are somewhat easy to make, because then I just add any song that makes me think of the story and then I sort the songs into chronological order of which part of the narrative I feel they apply to. Then I have a playlist for political music, so I guess that'd be a playlist by topic.
Normally when I listen to music on Spotify I just shuffle my liked songs though.
I make all my playlists by hand. I have three types:
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Mixes that I've made, either as gifts or for myself; where the order is carefully chosen so one song leads into another pleadingly, where no one artist dominates the tracklist, usually with a specific mood or theme, like "cleaning" or "summer" or "breakup". These kind of playlists are additive and creative; I start with an empty playlist then add and rearrange tracks until I'm happy.
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"Best of" playlists that are every song I like of a genre or artist or local scene or year or music label. These are usually in release order, grouped by album; or sometimes in descending order of how much I like them (but still grouped by album). These kind of playlists are subtractive and reactive; I dump large swathes of the library in and then remove whatever I don't like enough until only the cream is left.
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Hemerographs, which is a word I made up to describe playlists where I'm picking songs one at a time and adding them to the queue, but I'm saving the whole queue to listen to again later to recreate the vibe of that day / party / activity. It's additive like the mixes but more flow-of-consciousness and reactive; and also includes inputs from other people, since I'm usually making them on the fly in a social situation.
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Only 3...
- Albums -> Full albums
- Recopilations -> Compilation albums
- Random -> Songs
I just katamari all of my music into one big obnoxiously large playlist. If I want to hear music of a specific type, that's what albums are for.
I used to put so much time into playlists and general organizing/finetuning back when I used iTunes. Since the streaming age I just have a huge list of favorites and play that on shuffle sometimes.
I have some special playlists. One has songs I like singing along to and one has a few womens power ballads by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion that I like to turn up on long car trips from time to time.
I also had the thought that I would like someone to curate playlists for me based on mood. I often listen to a song and think, damn I wish I had a playlist with songs like this. Then I create a playlist with one song in it, struggle with naming it, name it „Vibing“ or „Goose bumps“ or something stupid like that and then never touch it again.
Lmao that last paragraph hits hard. I never know what to name my stuff either. Usually "a bit of everything", "energy", "cringe fandom songs"...
Right now my setup is as follows:
- one playlist for old-school bangers (40s-80s)
- one playlist for exclusively Lana Del Rey
- one playlist for nostalgic songs
- and one last playlist which contains my other 800 random songs.
So I'll have to see what I can do about this.
Name the playlist after a powerful lyric in one of the songs. Example: For a collage class once we could get extra credit for making an audio collage; I made a mix CD about collage with songs about rearranging, picking up pieces, sifting through garbage, that sort of thing, and I titled it "Canvas Full of Touch-Ups" after a line from the Atmosphere track "Saves the Day".
Music I DJ with I mostly play the same genre of music so I have a few playlists for stuff that is outside of my normal genre.
Then within the stuff I usually play I'll have smart playlists for each key (using the Camelot system so 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B etc)
I have a playlist for each month that has everything I have imported for that month of the year.
Some smart playlists to filter out a specific BPM or BPM range.
Playlists containing all the releases I have from specific labels in case I want to do a label only mix.
A playlist containing all the acapellas I have (I don't use a massive amount) so they are all in the same place to throw over the top of some other stuff if the feeling takes me.
Then I also have some playlists that I will create off the cuff throwing in selected artists that I might want to play at a particular time to capture a certain feel or vibe, then usually they stick around and I come back to them occasionally.
A preparation playlist which is a temp playlist where I'll throw random stuff I want to play that day maybe. Like for example I might have like this months additions and marchs additions to my library so I'll just throw both those playlists in the one preparation playlist to play from so they are all in one list.
My music is organised in alphabetical folders within each folder I have a folder for each artist where all their releases go. If I start getting a lot of stuff from one label or end up buying a label discography I'll make a folder for that label and remove any releases that might be in the individual artists folder and place it in the label one instead.
Then I have one random folder that has a few genre specific folders inside where I collect music from artists that I might just have one or two tracks from so they don't deserve their own artists folder.
When I actually listen to music on Spotify I don't use playlists. I want to listen to albums in the way they were intended, front to back usually, so I'll usually just pick what ever album I want at the time. Occasionally if I want to delve into an unknown to me genre I might search out a playlist made by someone else to explore artists I don't know to give me an idea of what I might want to then pursue listening to further.
I don't really do playlists for day to day. I pick an album and put it on. My music locally is organized into folders by group/album. I mostly use Bandcamp for streaming, where it's mostly album oriented.
If I want to make a mix, where it usually have some sort of theme or coherence instead of just being "these are songs I like", I stick it in Spotify if I want to share it.
I tend to be more depth first than some people. I find a band I like, and check out their stuff for a while. I don't do the like "grab 3000 songs at once" mode. That sounds kind of impersonal to me, but if it works for other people it's not my business.
Outside of sorting them by artist, album and maybe something else depending on what it is, I kind of don't. If there is a song that I like, I'll download it and add it to the folder where I keep all of my music. Yes, this does cause a playlist that is massive and kind of sporadic but I already listen to artists like A-one and Sound Holic which already have at least some level of variety to the style of music they make.
I have different folders for different genres, then subdivided in folders for year of release.
I spent way too much time organizing this way back so I stick with it. Problems with this are that genes can overlap (could be fixed with symlinks?) and the year is something you often have to look up (id3 often shows year of the album which is not always the year it came out).