I love Spotify. I might call it my favorite app, not only because I enjoy listening to music, but because I love curating playlists, including monthly ones. I started making new playlists every month in January 2022. Before, I had heard of people doing this and didn’t understand how someone could just switch from listening to one set of songs on the last day of the month to another set the very next day on the first. Now I understand. At the beginning of 2023, I was going to stop, but soon into January I realized I couldn’t continue using Spotify without also continuing to conform to this method of periodical categorization.
Now that I’ve been creating what I’d call the “monthly soundtracks” of my life for a while, I understand how to methodically approach this mode of organization. My playlists are composed of both songs I already knew that I had rediscovered around that time period or new songs I had heard either from friends, using Spotify’s radio feature, or browsing familiar and new artists’ discographies. When I hear a song I like that I know I’ll want to listen to on repeat for more than several days but it’s late in the month, I’ll put that song on the successive month’s playlist. That way, I can start to fashion the first taste of my next playlist in advance. There are some songs I discovered towards the beginning of months that I had wanted to play on repeat, which is why I still have other playlists based on genre/vibe and artist. I can still listen to those favorites without limiting them to the bounds of that month.
This strategy continues to expose me to new music and keeps me on the hunt for my new soon-to-be favorite songs. Sometimes, I find myself introduced to a new artist who ends up quickly flooding that individual playlist (a quick scroll over it may repeatedly showcase the same album cover from a single-artist deep-dive I went on). Overall, I would say my music taste has improved quite a bit through doing this. I now appreciate not only music, but the action of listening to it a lot more.
Looking back on my monthly song catalogs, I can romanticize my life in a way. When I hear songs or listen to a prior month’s playlist in its entirety, I’m overcome by a sweeping pang of nostalgia, concurrently reminiscing on the ambiance of that time. Like the score of a film, certain songs have coalesced with time-respective moments of my life, and it’s comforting to be able to revisit them at the click of a button. I can also return to some of my monthly favorites and listen to them with a new perspective from another point in my life. In this way, this process is more than one of compartmentalizing my music taste, but also compartmentalizing my life. It’s something I’d highly recommend. I can’t imagine Spotify-ing any other way.