Yearly music top 10

It’s weird seeing people posting their Spotify and Apple Music yearly wrap-ups when there’s still a whole month to go in 2022. What if there’s a new release in December that you simply cannot stop playing over and over? That song or album would count towards this year, right? I don’t know, it just seems like people are treating December as a throwaway month. As if it’s already time to wind down 2022, even though there’s still 31 more days to go.

As for me, I don’t stream music from any platform, so no year-end wrap ups for me to show. Like a dinosaur I still buy and download each album, then use iTunes to catalog them all. There’s something to not being beholden to an Internet connection to enjoy my tunes. I’m sure Spotify and the like allow users to download playlists. Music is super important to me, so I rather have actual files that I can fully backup onto an external location. A lot would have to go wrong for me to lose it all.

Not that a year-end wrap of my musical listening would be of great interest to you readers anyways. Every song on the list would be Kpop, the only genre of music I’ve listen to for the past decade. I do make my own top 10 songs of the year, which you can check out in my year-end blog post that comes out on the 31st of December. That list is not about the most plays, however. What counts is the impact and meaning a new (to me) song has during 2022.

And there’s been times when a new song coming out in December have made it onto my year-end list. There might be one this year!

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Light show.

Waiting for class

On my daily walk to work, I would see students parked along each side of 19th Avenue. Now that 50 percent of courses are back in physical session, there’s quite a few of them every morning. I would see the students sit in their cars whist waiting for their classes to start. It brings me back to my own college days. Instead of 19th Avenue, I would park at the other side of campus on Lake Merced Drive. I too have to get there early in the morning just to snatch a parking spot.

But I wouldn’t sit in my car to wait for classes to begin, however. Partly because I didn’t have a smartphone until my fourth year of college. The kids these days have it easy! Super fast Internet device at the palm of their hands. I too would chill in my Toyota Corolla if I had an iPhone back then. Instead I went to the library or the student union and sat there, listening to music on my iPod. Remember those?

Speaking of music, a few days ago the streaming service Spotify had an outage. One of my friends texted the group saying he now has to listen to his own MP3 collection, which only dates out to around 2010. I of course don’t have such problems. Unlike everybody else, I have not made the transition to streaming. To this day I continue to buy and download my music, stored completely on device. Not as a defense against Internet outages, but more like I’m a digital hoarder and prefer to have my curated collection.

179 gigabytes and counting…

But that’s the thing with streaming: there’s always this theoretical possibility that the services will go out of business and then you wouldn’t have access to your music anymore. Or your TV shows and movies. Videos I tend to watch once and forget about it, so losing access wouldn’t hurt. Music, however, I listen to constantly every single day. Therefore I would like some modicum of insurance in case shit happens. So long as I can still buy individual songs and albums on the iTunes Store, I will continue to do so.

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Mismatched architecture.

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.

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Sunshine on a school day.