Tag: Spotify

The Digital Evolution

On By bigbadburchIn News9 Comments
searching for my favorite hits on Spotify

I had a pretty big change in how I do things as far as music is concerned, and I thought it’d be a good bit for a post. Digital music has been around a very long time if you want to consider the CD, but for my purposes today I will refer to the MP3 or digital revolution of the early 2000’s, that which more or less displaced the CD as a viable format.

In the early 2000’s I was not an early convert to hard drive-based digital. I was “old school” and still respected the physical format of music. I recall between 2004 and 2006 people I knew were themselves fully converted to the iPod or whatever MP3 device was around. I was not having it, I was very die hard against it and was a total elitist snob about it. Yes, I had digital music on my computer where I made playlists out of albums I wouldn’t necessarily buy, and yes that digital music was not necessarily acquired legally, but I was still in the “so and so put out an album, and I’m going to buy it” mindset. And the prevalent format at the time was still the CD, this was just before the hipster revolution that saw the massive comeback of vinyl.

It wasn’t until sometime in 2008 that I relented and got my first iPod. A good friend bought a new one for himself and sold me his old one at a good price. I had all of my CD collection and also copied my friend’s collection to a hard drive to put on my new iPod. Additionally I had great access to several other friends’ CD collections and I was able to quickly build a massive digital library. I had my iPod almost stuffed, and it was something like 17,000 albums or some crazy shit like that.

And going digital did truly work out well. I have to give props to those who spoke well about it when I was too obstinate to listen. It changed how I listened to stuff, mainly in that I would give far more time to albums I had laying around but didn’t often play. I also took more chances on styles outside of my general vision, even if I didn’t always land on something I really wanted to hear again.

As time wore on, the concept of maintaining a digital collection gave way to streaming. Spotify was first, then many others hopped in the streaming market. It’s far more convenient to pay a few bucks a month to access a vast catalog of music instantly than it is to rip CDs or buy digital downloads. Just as digital became the prevalent format, the concept of a streaming library overtook a hard drive full of stuff. Artists might not get paid worth a damn out of streaming and especially Spotify, but that is another conversation for another time.

Once Spotify worked out a few early issues (their search function was pure trash when it first released) and they cut deals to land many prominent artist hold-outs like Metallica, Pink Floyd and others, I did start using it. Far easier for me to check out an artist I never heard of on there and decide if I liked them enough to buy the album, rather than shell out on a blind purchase that I may not like and, at least in terms of a CD, was now worthless due to the digital market.

I did still hold on to my digital collection, though. For a long time phones had SD card slots and it was really easy for me to keep my digital collection on it. I would use some whatever player to access my own collection and then use Spotify when I was playing stuff I didn’t own or new stuff.

That all changed just last month, when I upgraded my phone. Most smartphones no longer use SD cards, their own internal storage is pretty huge. I decided to not move my digital music collection over to my new phone – I have more than enough space if I don’t move it, but copying it all would take up nearly half of the storage.

This does mean that I’m now using Spotify for all of my on-the-go music. I do download stuff if I’m gonna be in a spot without service, but it’s all streaming for me now. I either go for albums I know and love, new stuff I want to check out, or old things I missed. I also have some massive playlists I’m building based on decade or genre, those are works in progress but I’ve already got a massive amount of stuff on a few of them.

It is cool how Spotify sucks as much as any other digital music player when it comes to the shuffle feature. I’ve never found one that has a really good randomization, most of them seem to gravitate to songs that get played a lot, and that often means the first batch of songs it plays out of a shuffle. I have seen worse programs, but the Spotify shuffle does leave something to be desired. It has a massive recency bias, in that if I add new songs to a playlist, well, guess what I’m gonna hear on my next shuffle? I guess it gets the job mostly done, though.

That just about wraps up what I wanted to say about this next step in my listening evolution. I do still maintain both vinyl and CDs at home, but it’s all in on streaming now for me when not at the house, or when checking out unfamiliar stuff. I do wonder what the “next steps” in music listening are, but I’m far too old and unimaginative to speculate on how things might go.

2022 Spotify Wrapped

On By bigbadburchIn Uncategorized5 Comments

The quick and easy posts continue this week as it’s that time of year for Spotify Wrapped.

I’ll add a quick bit of context before getting into mine – this year I used Spotify for two main purposes – small playlists of 6 or so songs when I go on bicycle rides (which is most every day) and to check out new releases. I figured my wrap-up would be distorted this year based on the small series of 30 minute playlists I constantly rotate through, but as it turns out I can say the results were fairly representative of my listening habits.

First up the is genres. Not a whole lot to get into here, besides whatever “post-doom metal” is. Music descriptors get awesome these days when everyone is trying to invent a new term for a sound that sets even somewhat apart from the rest. I’m also not entirely sure what they’re referring to with “country rock” but that’s a more understandable term.

Now on top artist. Not really shocking to me – I have a handful of LoG songs in my playlists and then when Omens came out in early October I played the hell out of it. I’ve liked them for a long time but the new album really knocked me over and likely explains how they took my top artist crown this year.

And here is the overall Wrapped sum-up. Kind of funny that my top played song in 2022 was the same one as from 2021. My only real “huh?” moment is Muse being in my top artist list – they put out a new album this year which didn’t really hit with me, though one song off of it is pretty awesome. I guess that one new song and whatever sprinkling of others I have in my playlists put them over the top. None of the others register any surprise to me all.

Here is one other little bonus that was going around in the past few days leading up to Wrapped – the Instafest lineup. It essentially takes your Spotify data and generates a three day festival based on what you’ve played. Here is mine.

I’m honestly pretty happy with mine. Now, I do love Oasis, but in no universe would I book Iron Maiden as an opening act for Oasis. I’m sure plenty of people would have my head for that. But beyond that, I would pay huge money to attend that fest. It lines up with what I like pretty nicely. The only oddball? I don’t know the artist “Lord” as listed on the festival bill. No clue who that is referring to and I’m not getting any easy answers on Spotify.

That covers my Spotify Wrapped for 2022 and also the bonus Instafest thing. As a preview for my end of year stuff, I’ll do my top albums of 2022 on December 12, in place of the regular Album of the Week feature. I’ll probably do a small Songs of the Year list too, maybe three or five, don’t know yet. On through the ass end of 2022.

Spotify Wrapped 2021

On By bigbadburchIn Favorites1 Comment

I was shuffling around my next few posts a bit and had a bit of a hang-up as I tried to figure out what to do for today. As luck would have it, Spotify would drop some quick and easy content in my lap in the form of their Wrapped end of year data dump.

For those unaware, Spotify provides a rundown of a user’s most-played songs, genres and artists for the year every December. It’s a neat little thing that provides a bit of info and can also be fun and silly. For me and the purposes of this blog, it’s a great way to get some content with just some screenshots and a few words. Let’s have at it.

This is the total minutes I spent listening on Spotify this year. This is by far the most I’ve used the service in a year. For the biggest part of 2021 I had a job where I could play music all day and I’d alternate between Spotify and the digital music collection on my phone. It’s over 450 hours, which is a fair bit of time when considering I didn’t use it all the time.

This tidbit did shock me a little. I don’t really know how Spotify does genres, I haven’t looked at the least how deep they get. I don’t feel like I listened to 35 different genres of music but I’ll take their word for it. If symphonic blackened britpop deathcore counts as 4 separate genres then I can see it. Not sure if I heard any whale sounds in the past year…

Here are the top 5 genres. Shoegaze sticks out a bit on the list but it’s not surprising since I just got into it this year. I did way more exploring of it than I did of anything else. Nothing else is a real shock. I did listen to what I guess is a lot of hard rock this year though I figure some of that might actually be indie rock or some offshoot of that. Again, who knows how Spotify genrefies things.

My most-played song of the year is no surprise at all. I played the ever living shit of this right after I heard it. In truth I’ve played it way more than that because I eventually got a digital copy on my phone and I’ve also played the YouTube video countless times. I’ve probably doubled the Spotify play count. I’ve literally been bitched at for how much I’ve played this song.

One bit of a shocker here. I didn’t realize I’d played Muse that much. I honestly only started listening to them in earnest this year. I wouldn’t have thought they’d rank that high or that Hysteria would be the song that did. The rest are all reasonable – I played LoG a lot because I didn’t own Ashes Of The Wake on any format until a few weeks back. I played the Iron Maiden lead single multiple times a day until Senjutsu released and then I played the CDs or vinyl.

This is absolutely no surprise at all. Emma Ruth Rundle was easily my most-played artist of the year, and I only truly began listening to her about halfway through the year. According to Spotify I spent a total of 3,682 minutes playing her songs in the span of about 5 months. That’s over 61 hours playing the same artist. Yeah, I dig her stuff that much. And this also doesn’t account for when I eventually got her albums on vinyl, which provided digital download copies as well.

Being in the top 0.1% of listeners is really cool, I have never seen that before. I’ll put that on my resume.

Again, Muse is throwing me a bit. I mean, I’m not one to argue with statistics, but still. I would’ve thought Lorna Shore had the number 2 spot in the bag, but I guess I really, really liked Muse earlier in the year. None of the others are huge shocks. I got Rage’s stuff on vinyl about halfway through the year but I was blasting them a lot in the first part of 2021.

I don’t know what the hell this is but I guess I’m bold and wistful, based on my musical tastes of sad indie rock and deathcore. I don’t know, whatever. I’m not really all that bold I don’t think. Wistful is probably right. I don’t how much of my personality I’m going to analyze from a damn music streaming app.

That’s a wrap for the Spotify Wrap 2021. I didn’t listen to Taylor Swift for over 200,000 hours like some people but hey, I did listen to something. We’ll see what the next year brings as Spotify remains more a vehicle for discovery for me instead of what I use to listen to my favorite stuff.