Songs — Blog — Healy Chen

To the music

Every year I compile a top 10 list of songs that was significant to me for that particular year. I’ve done so since 2011, and it’s quite interesting to look back at these lists and see what songs are on there. The music provides a symbolic window into what sort of year I’ve had, and what kind of feelings I was contemplating throughout. Similar to the 365 challenge that I’ve also been doing since 2011, it’s great fun to look back at the times gone by, which is precisely why I do this record keeping, if you will.

A few days ago I took a look at the song list from 2019, and I was surprised to find that even though the songs were important enough to make the top 10 list, the amount of times I actually listened to each track were vanishingly little - one of the songs a mere 15 times! This made me realize how drastically I’ve decreased in music listening; the top 10 lists of earlier years featured songs I’ve played hundreds of times, so it was shocking to find one that made a list with a play count in the teens.

For a guy that used to relish listening to music on the bus to and from school, oh how the times have changed indeed. Surely the available explosion of podcasts in recent years have absolutely obliterated opportunities for music listening. I’m big on always striving to learn new things, so podcasts have dominated my casual hours; why waste the precious minutes on repeating tracks when there’s so much to learn from many interesting people and subjects.

I don’t exactly regret listening to podcasts: some of my mental health breakthroughs in regards to dealing with anxiety is owed to information gleamed from them. That said, in this time of continued sheltering at home and running out of proper things to do, I shall endeavor to indulge in music far more often than I’ve had in the past years. In the moments where I’m searching for stuff to do to pass the time, why not put on the set of Bose noise cancelling headphones and press play on iTunes.

It sure beats looking at the horror show on twitter for the umpteenth time.

Top 10 songs lists

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.