How do you organise your music playlists?

jjjalljs , 5 hours ago

I don’t really do playlists for day to day. I pick an album and put it on. My music locally is organized into folders by group/album. I mostly use Bandcamp for streaming, where it’s mostly album oriented.

If I want to make a mix, where it usually have some sort of theme or coherence instead of just being “these are songs I like”, I stick it in Spotify if I want to share it.

I tend to be more depth first than some people. I find a band I like, and check out their stuff for a while. I don’t do the like “grab 3000 songs at once” mode. That sounds kind of impersonal to me, but if it works for other people it’s not my business.

vortexal , 5 hours ago

Outside of sorting them by artist, album and maybe something else depending on what it is, I kind of don’t. If there is a song that I like, I’ll download it and add it to the folder where I keep all of my music. Yes, this does cause a playlist that is massive and kind of sporadic but I already listen to artists like A-one and Sound Holic which already have at least some level of variety to the style of music they make.

astrsk , 5 hours ago

Most of my playlists are actually by artist. Silly as it sounds I will put whole albums by the same artist in release order into new playlists by their name so I can just ask Siri to “play playlist <artist name>” and listen to the albums in order as I tend to listen to whole albums. The other playlists are like my year in review playlists that were automatically generated and some curated playlists like “weekly new music” and “top alternative” type stuff that I didn’t create but added and listen to often.

If I want a mix of stuff I like, I don’t turn to playlists anymore and instead I just ask Siri to “play some music” because the “just for you” radio is so good that I get tons of hits and top songs for my own taste as well as discover tons of new to me music that gets sprinkled in that the algorithm finds for me.

If the “play some music” stuff ends up not what I want to hear right then, I’ll just make the same request again or “play some different music” and it will switch to other music it knows I like. This is helpful when one request sends me down electronic path when I want more alt rock, etc.

TheBlackKnight , 5 hours ago

I don’t. I only have a Liked Songs on Spotify. I like the randomness of it all.

ClassifiedPancake , 4 hours ago

I used to put so much time into playlists and general organizing/finetuning back when I used iTunes. Since the streaming age I just have a huge list of favorites and play that on shuffle sometimes.

I have some special playlists. One has songs I like singing along to and one has a few womens power ballads by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion that I like to turn up on long car trips from time to time.

I also had the thought that I would like someone to curate playlists for me based on mood. I often listen to a song and think, damn I wish I had a playlist with songs like this. Then I create a playlist with one song in it, struggle with naming it, name it „Vibing“ or „Goose bumps“ or something stupid like that and then never touch it again.

clark OP , 3 hours ago

Lmao that last paragraph hits hard. I never know what to name my stuff either. Usually “a bit of everything”, “energy”, “cringe fandom songs”…

Right now my setup is as follows:

• one playlist for old-school bangers (40s-80s)
• one playlist for exclusively Lana Del Rey
• one playlist for nostalgic songs
• and one last playlist which contains my other 800 random songs.

So I’ll have to see what I can do about this.

Nemo , 2 hours ago

Name the playlist after a powerful lyric in one of the songs. Example: For a collage class once we could get extra credit for making an audio collage; I made a mix CD about collage with songs about rearranging, picking up pieces, sifting through garbage, that sort of thing, and I titled it “Canvas Full of Touch-Ups” after a line from the Atmosphere track “Saves the Day”.

communism , 3 hours ago

I have a few playlists that are accompaniments to particular stories/pieces of media. Basically playlists with a narrative they follow. Those are somewhat easy to make, because then I just add any song that makes me think of the story and then I sort the songs into chronological order of which part of the narrative I feel they apply to. Then I have a playlist for political music, so I guess that’d be a playlist by topic.

Normally when I listen to music on Spotify I just shuffle my liked songs though.

Nemo , 2 hours ago

I make all my playlists by hand. I have three types:

• Mixes that I’ve made, either as gifts or for myself; where the order is carefully chosen so one song leads into another pleadingly, where no one artist dominates the tracklist, usually with a specific mood or theme, like “cleaning” or “summer” or “breakup”. These kind of playlists are additive and creative; I start with an empty playlist then add and rearrange tracks until I’m happy.
• “Best of” playlists that are every song I like of a genre or artist or local scene or year or music label. These are usually in release order, grouped by album; or sometimes in descending order of how much I like them (but still grouped by album). These kind of playlists are subtractive and reactive; I dump large swathes of the library in and then remove whatever I don’t like enough until only the cream is left.
• Hemerographs, which is a word I made up to describe playlists where I’m picking songs one at a time and adding them to the queue, but I’m saving the whole queue to listen to again later to recreate the vibe of that day / party / activity. It’s additive like the mixes but more flow-of-consciousness and reactive; and also includes inputs from other people, since I’m usually making them on the fly in a social situation.