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.
- Assemble/gather songs and albums either from the wild (friend recommendations, radio) or related to an existing artist or aesthetic in my library (city pop, denpa, jazz fusion). There is no discerning at this stage; everything is fair game. I want to shout out Luke Smith’s
booksplittool for easily splitting albums into neatly labeled and easily skimmable tracks. - Listen to the first thirty seconds of music on each track and listen for any ideas that I want to hear elaborated, usually in the form of erratic harmony, clever melody, thick vocal mixes, irregular meter, and/or busy percussion. Remember that number 75% that I cited? Well, about that many don’t make the next round, but now, I get that out of the way up front. If albums have more than 4 duds in a row from the get go, I trash the whole album. I find myself adjusting the strictness of my heuristics to achieve at least a 10:1 ratio, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule and comes down to how forgiving I feel that day 😜.
- Get myself a sizable collection of songs with potential and run them through
ffmpeg-normalizerfor portable playback and to give every track a fair chance. The goal of stage two is to listen to each song 3 times, and I usually go about this by listening to the same cohort in alphabetical order 3 times. This, as opposed to a shuffle, makes picking up where I left off a lot easier. Most of this meditation is done in the shower, but on days I simply don’t feel like immersing in Japanese, I might instead spend idle time listening to more songs, especially when the cohort is big (80+ sometimes!) and I really want to get to a song on the next cohort. I give myself permission to start deleting the second time through, usually due to lack of development (vaporwave and all its descendants are guilty of this) or cringy lyrics I can actually understand. - Move on to the next cohort waiting for its shower time, but not before whizzing through the survivors and making the final calls. The ratio here is closer to 12:1. This isn’t to say that they’re immune to deletion, but that the likelihood of me wasting time and storage space with the skip button is far lower.
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.