music discovery

little manga girl (Yotsuba) putting on headphones and screeching in horror

A problem I’ve run across in my music library is that I would add every new song that even remotely caught my attention, and unsurprisingly enough, they end up boring and annoying me in shuffle mixes not long after. Over the past two years, I’ve trimmed down my library of 3000 songs to about 800 or so that are interesting enough to play fully through and worth sharing at parties or long car rides.

In any case, I’ve been toying with the optimal way to quickly evaluate and add spicy new bangers to my music library. The system I have come up with so far has four stages.

In this way, music discovery becomes a chore that I see merit in carrying out. My tastes are already heavily solidified and will only become more so with age, so I feel an artistic obligation to my future self in expanding the circle as much as I can until then.