Notes on Music

A thing they don't tell you about being the playlist architect, resident taste maker and vibe curator is that it gets boring fast. Yes, discovery on streaming platforms like Spotify is quite decent. And yes, finding high quality people with excellent music taste on these platforms is awesome but when you have music available at your finger tips all the time, it loses its charm. Izzy Ampil calls this phenomenon frictionlessness, the ease of having all the music in the world 24/7 at your beck and call.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with minimizing frictionlessness. What I am trying to get at is the idea of you losing interest in something when it is too common and too easily available. There are things I do not like about Spotify; how the UI gets more cluttered with every feature update, how there is no way of getting rid of podcast suggestions on the home page, and how Spotify Wrapped always feels like it is missing key information. Like dammit I do not want 3d design elements and snappy animations. I do not want loud colors and clever copywriting. I want you to show me granular data on listening habits. What good is the annual playlist created by the algorithm if it pisses you off and compels you to create a new one in retaliation?

These complaints made me wonder if I was looking for a solution in the wrong places. Maybe an app like this existed elsewhere. Soon after, I found out about Last.fm. It is a nifty website that makes you these weekly and monthly charts on listening habits. It also shows you data on the most active listening times as well as change in musical genre from week-to-week. If you're a power user of Spotify and you want granularity, Last.fm sounds like a good place to track your music taste. By doing so, you also gear yourself from avoiding a potential disappointment with the next Spotify Wrapped. Which leads to another question: will having data from Last.fm make any difference to listening habits apart from a casual "ah, cool stats" remark?

This is what I tried to find out this year.

A look at the music taste from this year

I ran a lot this year while preparing for two half marathons and that meant being hopelessly dependent on music to get me going on long runs (apart from occasional interviews and lecture stuff). A curse of getting bored easily with music meant that I was always on the prowl for new music to ensure I had several music playlists at hand. All this experimentation was bound to show up on both Spotify and Last.fm leading to some artists being overly represented in the monthly/yearly stats when I was just sorting through their discography.

To no one's surprise, this is exactly what happened. Six out of the ten highest scrobbled (a term Last.fm uses for a music track that was played) music artists in my monthly artist rankings were people who I had discovered this year. The thing that was different this time was that I knew what artists I was listening to the most on a month-by-month basis.

Next, came the question of average listening duration by month and comparing them with each other. I'm gonna be real with yall. I was a bit mortified when I looked at these charts for the first time. The particularly high listening duration in the first three months can be explained by the fact that I had a half marathon coming up in mid-April and I was increasing my mileage every week. We have a somewhat similar pattern between May-June as I had another half-marathon coming up in the last week of July. The decline in listening activity around October is due to me being busier than usual with life, work commitments and geopolitical events which made it hard to be a Ohrwurm. In November and December, listening activity completely stopped.

When I looked at the summary Last.fm stats in early December, I wasn't surprised. Rihanna, Dua Lipa, PCD and Pharrell were among some of my top albums whereas I knew that only certain songs from these albums were part of the half a dozen playlists I had for running. Pop is fine. I love pop but do I listen to it all.the.time outside running? Nope.

So obviously I had to go back and check the playlists I had made during the year and take out some picks. To my amusement, I noticed how prevalent the recency bias was in my memory. I had to remind myself how much I listened to Anderson.Paak earlier this year and had to include him in addition to the artists I listened to in early fall. I'm happy with how the grid looks like below. A mishmash of songs taken from various playlists - pop, rock, jazz, soul, hip hop, R&B, instrumentals and so on. Obviously this is only a fraction of the songs and not everything can be shared publicly. That being said, "Crude Drawing of an Angel" by Caroline Polachek was the song I listened to the most during the year ( a whopping 200+ times).

A thing I wanted to note was the number of international musicians specifically from the MENA region that I had listened to this year. It was so lovely to have come across singers like Hindi Zahra, Amina Alaoui, Lena Chamamyan, Driss El Maloumi, Oumou Sangaré, Lamine Konté, and El Hadj Ensemble to name a few.

I very rarely find an album that is 100% sublime from start to finish. Usually I have 2-3 favorites and anything on top of that is just bonus for me. In 2023, I thought these albums were quite good overall:

1. Amina Alaoui — Start with the album Alcantara. Many of her songs feel like a continuous lullaby sung by a nightingale. What I really appreciated about her music was that her voice is more dominant over the background music and it has a very powerful, soothing effect.
2. Anderson.Paak — Listen to everything in his discography. He's exactly the kind of groovy I like and is adjacent to the likes of Nx Worries, Free Nationals, and Isiah Rashad. Start with the albums Oxnard then Ventura and then Yes Lawd.
3. Little Simz — Simzy is fearless. Simzy is direct. Simzy sings about important issues like womanhood and identity. I was particularly drawn to the lyrics in some of her songs in both the 2021 & 2022 albums. It's powerful stuff and also feels very personal at the same time.
4. Hindi Zahra — A Moroccan singer who can sing jazz and soul-tinged ballads beautifully? Inject that straight into my veins. I remember going through Zahra's entire discography in a day. She was That captivating. Both the Handmade & Homeland albums have some excellent tracks that I have listened to not just for one week in summer but throughout the year.
5. CeeLo Green — I had been making a mental note for forever to listen to more of CeeLo's music after Outkast's unforgettable track "Liberation" that features CeeLo and Erykah Badu. This was a great decision and I really think CeeLo has a very unique voice. He is kinda hard to pinpoint for where to start because most songs I liked of him were where he was featured as a collaborating artist on other people's albums. I recommend his collabs with De La Soul, the Midnight Hour, Mac Miller, Outkast, and Raekwon among others.
6. Ethel Cain — I discovered Cain around my birthday and what a joy it was to comb through her discography. She was the one artist whose songs I listened to everywhere this year whether it was running errands or going for early morning runs or in bed or in the kitchen (Cain's music is extremely female-coded). Some of Cain's musical notes could only be explained as artistic wailing; for example, in the track Michelle Pfeiffer, but it's cool when She does it! Shout out to Lari for introducing her to me. Start with the Inbred album and then check out Gibson Girl.

I also did a lot of baking this year and slowly but surely an entire 150+ songs jazz/soul playlist materialized because of that practice. While I have been a long time Bill Evans fan, I still have a love/hate relationship with jazz. This is not evident from the grid above but just know that I listened to more jazz this year than all previous years combined. I usually associate jazz with things like kneading, bain marie, preparing frosting, and washing dishes (Pavlovian Conditioning, right?!!). The biggest joke was when that baking playlist of mine became one of my most popular playlists (and it wasn't even my most meticulously curated playlist!).

A Pause

Music is a force unlike few other. The fact that it can elevate and corroborate whatever you are feeling and can go on playing forever without any pushback or introspection is what gives it power. It is the ultimate tool for validation. You're right. You're the best. The world is at your feet. The opps ain't shit. In the hands of a perceptive person with an astute music taste, it is a weapon that can be deployed whenever wherever.

Truth be told, once peak running season was over and I got busy with other projects I had less and less time to pay attention to my Very Important Spotify Playlists. I also had a feeling that I had listened to more music this year than any other year before so I was a bit mortified of some of these Last.fm numbers. I read an article back in October of a girl who wrote about quitting Spotify to go back to listening to music on CDs. I had been contemplating the idea of quitting before, but not because I enjoyed collecting CDs. I just don't like the idea of any piece of software having this kind of hold on me that I start caring too much about maintaining a presence on it.

I joked with the authors of that article that I was going to quit Spotify too and that if I am successful, I would update them in the future. At the time of writing this article, it has been two months and a few days since that has happened. I have, thankfully, not had any strong withdrawal symptoms. I did not jump to Apple Music. I did not rush to make substitute playlists on YouTube Music. There are no dedicated music apps on my phone anymore.

Was this hard? Not really. But to be honest, it was easier because I was busy and there were geopolitical events that were weighing heavily on me so music was quite literally the last thing on my mind. If I did listen to any music during Oct-Dec for example at shops or offices or marketplaces, it did not feel the same as before. I swear it is a good thing. It's like what Cheryl Cole says:

“Too much of anything can make you sick,
even the good can be a curse”

- Cheryl Cole

So what then? Have I become the renounce-all-music-and-retreat-to-the-woods type? No, not at all. I still love chiming into the occasional music discourse. I remember quite fondly when I made two official wedding playlists last year, one for my sister's wedding and one for a friend's wedding. But I also don't want to be the resident taste maker at all times.

To answer what I asked earlier in this article, having Last.fm track my listening habits did not make me decide to change the music I listen to just so I could have bragging rights on elite music taste at the end of the year. On the contrary, it made me ambivalent towards the whole tracking thing. It's fine to not have a pulse on what's happening in the music scene. It's fine to not share Spotify Wrapped updates in December with everyone on Twitter and just laugh at the memes only. Obliviousness has its own charm.

Will I regret this? Will I cave and make a secret alt Spotify account? I don't know but I have to try. I'll report back around the same time next year if anything changes.