There’s an ever-growing amount of music available today, a few taps (or clicks) away. I for one feel like there’s a lot of great music in many genres and styles, coming from many countries, and in many languages. And there’s always new, interesting stuff coming out regularly.
Whether a new release from an artist you like, or an old one you want to go back to, there are so many options to choose from at any given point in time. Yet we can only hear one at a time, so we must choose. So…
How do you choose what to listen to, and how do you keep up with everything you want to keep up with? Do you manage to listen to everything you want to on a regular basis? Do you instead choose to articially limit yourself to keep sane? Or is your music taste narrow enough this is of no worry?
I use Plex for my music, which has a lot of mechanisms that help me process new stuff.
For example, I have a smart playlist that only plays things I haven’t heard in a year. This is my “Frontier” playlist to hear new things. As I listen, I rate stuff with stars.
From there, I then have smart playlists that only play highly rated things I haven’t heard in a week or two. Depending on my mood, I’ll either listen to my frontier playlist, or my liked playlist… with other playlists further scoping on genre as desired.
All these playlists filter out things that are lowly rated if I’ve heard them more than X times.
I generally shove anything/everything anyone recommends into the pot, which then naturally folds into my frontier playlist which then fold naturally into my liked playlists. I’ve discovered quite a lot of stuff I never would’ve predicted I’d like this way. From there, I’ll look at recommended artists from the bands I have and like and add those as well.