Addicted to New Music - What's My Deal??
Investigating a peculiar fact about my Wrapped.
Welcome to Max’s Music Mondays. My ~music discovery newsletter~ where I get too excited about songs I love. I hope you love them too. If you do, you can follow along on spotify and please be sure to absolute smash that dang subscribe button! tysm :) Your paid subscriptions go towards supporting the artists you read about here too!!
My Spotify Wrapped: A Dire Commitment to the Present
I briefly touched on my top 100 songs on Monday, breaking things down into that incredible pie chart. I let the songs categorize themselves, neatly falling into several buckets:
New Tunes from Old Favs (39 songs)
Newly Discovered, Instantly in Love (19)
Album of the Year Candidates (13)
Big Names, Finally a Fan (12)
Medium Build Songs (8)
I Always Liked Them, Now I’m Obsessed (6)
And the category that caught my eye the most:
Songs Released before 2023 (3)
Of all the songs in the history of music only THREE songs released before 2023 made my 100 most played playlist. I didn’t realize I was so deeply focused on new music. Especially at this time of the year, I feel overwhelmed by it and with the small percent of it I actually hear, it never feels like “I’m on top of music” right now.
It’s jarring actually. To look at this playlist of 100 songs I love and think that only 3 of them will be listened to with such regularity next year? It’s kind of heartbreaking for me to think about.
I just saw Indigo De Souza last night at The Fonda. Sick show, sick band, and the songs just HIT live. But money says I won’t revisit this record more than a few times next year?? That’s a shame, no?
The stat gets cited often, but there’s some crazy number of songs uploaded to Spotify every day - MBW says 60k. So obviously there’s an influx of releases. An impossible list to keep up with, I try hard to build systems (and playlists) to give me a shot at staying up to speed. But why am I trying so hard to begin with?
My gut says it’s primarily out of a want to “participate in culture”, which totally rocks as a reason to shape my behavior lol.