I’m taking a bold step today. I’m going to start relying on Spotify and not physical MP3 files for my music.
I have two main playlists: one for favorite songs and another for keeper albums. On the Keepers playlist, I only put the first track of an album. I can go into the playlist and click the album title to play the full album. Nice and neat.
If I’m evaluating an album, I create a playlist for it and prepend a dash in the front of the name, like “-The Band Perry – Pioneer”. If I end up liking the album, I add the first song to my Keepers playlist. Individual songs that I really like obviously go on the Favorites playlist.
One thing I wish Spotify would do is have an option to add songs to the top of a playlist. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I like to have my most recent favorite at the top of the list and chronologically go down from there. Until they add that feature, I have to drag songs to the top after I add them. Not a big deal, but an extra step.
If you are wondering, why Spotify. It’s because it allows me to mix Spotify songs with physical MP3s in the same playlist. A few artists and albums aren’t on Spotify. It’s really the best of all worlds. I also like the fact that you can manually order your playlists and it doesn’t force you into alphabetical order. Thank you Spotify!
The biggest concern I have is what would happen if my playlists got nuked and could not be restored. My solution for now is to select all of the songs (Ctrl+a) and drag them to a Word document. At least I’ll have something to refer to if something catastrophic happens.
It’s very liberating doing this. I’ve been obsessing over managing my MP3 collection since at least 1997 and I think they were MP2s! (really.) I guess I would say I’m also a little bit uncomfortable, but I’m sure that will go away with time. I love the fact that if I change anything in Spotify…bam!…it’s all changed on my iPhone, iPad and desktop. No more syncing with lame iTunes! Yes!