Continuing on yesterday’s discussion about people already putting a bookend to 2019 but we’ve still got the entire month of December left to go, later on that evening, I saw people posting their top 10 Spotify plays of the year (Spotify 2019 Wrapped, officially), which is fascinating. While I think it’s a bit premature to do the list now rather than waiting until say the last week of December, it’s probably not likely there’s going to be a new song release this month that will accrue enough plays to beat out songs released far earlier in the year.
I think can safely say that no one is going to stream the new Taylor Swift Christmas song for hundreds of times within the next twenty or so days.
The calendar will soon turn towards the next decade, and yet I still haven’t gotten onboard with music streaming, be it with Spotify, or Apple Music. I greatly prefer to keep and store physical, totally not pirated, copies of music in my vast iTunes library, something that’s gradually grown since I bought my very first Mac laptop during sophomore year of university. I don’t want to deal with importing and remaking playlists, much less lose the entire stats on the number of plays over the years.
Now that I think about it, I had a good opportunity to migrate to streaming earlier in the year. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I lost possession of my iMac, and with it my music collection. Obviously, I made backups of all the songs, but the iTunes library data was gone, meaning I had to start completely over: reconstruct playlists, and the play counts starting back at zero. If wanting to preserve those things were indeed what was holding me back from converting to streaming, then it’s curious that I continued on with physical songs after the “wipeout”.
Habits are difficult to change, I guess.
So unfortunately for me, I don’t have the full statistics for the music I listened to this year - half the year’s plays are gone. But, play-count is not how I like to construct my yearly top 10 music list anyways: I actually analyze the totality of the new songs (to me ) this year and pick out the 10 most impactful. Because often times, the song with the most plays just happens to be the most catchy, rather than any sort of great meaning.
Sunshine on a school day.