Since March 2018 I've created a new playlist "[Month Year]" on the 1st of every month, and every time I listen to a song I enjoy (whether it's new or old or whatever - no rules) I add it to that month's playlist. In fact the only "rule" is to never remove a song once it's added.

Then at the end of the year I make 24-song a "Best of [Year]" playlist where I go back and pick 2 songs from each month, in no particular order, to sum up my year in music.

This tends to reflect my music enjoyment (vs listening) much better than Spotify Wrapped, which over-indexes on music I listen to at work or in the car (when I'm often not really paying attention).

I just crossed 100 months back in November or December, and I have to say it's pretty fun to go back and check out a given month/year in the past (much like the author) and revisit what I was into at the time.

From the title I was expecting something like "how I archived my Spotify memories in a plain text file".

Personally i started a "To Remember" playlist in about 2009 and have been adding every single track I've liked enough since to said playlist. By now its 4127 songs!

With the timestamps its a great way to relive past periods of my life, and also I can put it on shuffle and get the soundtrack of my life. Been a great boon in my life for a very long time.

Also, to keep track of albums I've listened to i keep a "Where I've Been" list where the first track of every album I've listened to in its entirety goes. Its a small way to fight the ephemerality of listening to an album in the digital environment.

I actually i scrolled through the entire list just two days ago and bathed in the memories, was fun to see all the places I had been and forgotten about.

I really do miss having a rack of CDs to let my eyes float over for the memories, and the digital "equivalent" is a brittle substitute, but it has enhanced my life in many ways so I've come to accept the tradeoff.

Similar ideas:

I've been keeping notes in Roam Research for nearly 6 years now. Whenever I'm writing notes for that day, I'll go back to the same day 5, 4, 3, etc. years ago and see what I was working on.

I also recently went through the trouble of getting all of my running data into a spreadsheet. I started in 2018 and have gone through three different apps. Currently on my to-vibe-code-list: a little app that takes all of my runs from Apple Health and makes a neat dashboard showing pace, miles, routes, etc. over the years.

My "Starred" playlist has the first song added in 2010. When Spotify decided "Like" was now going to be how to favourite songs i just ignored it and kept using the Starred playlist.

I do wish the play history and play counts were kept longer. Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime play counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.

However, there is one major flaw. I’ve found that treating music as a key to unlock memory from certain periods means I tend not to revisit that same music casually because I know that each time I listen to music it gets re-encoded to current events in time.

I can’t remember where I read that (some study from ages ago) but basically if there was a song you listened to a lot as a kid and then you hear it again it will remind you of that time in your childhood, but if you keep listening to it then the song also gets attached to current memory and in 20 years when you hear it again you will have a mix of childhood and adult memories flooding back - or some diluted memory.

It might not work that way for everyone but I’ve found it to be true at least in my own personal experience.

I've been running it for 460 weeks now - almost 9 years of memories. Not every song means something important, but a lot of them bring me right back to the time when I added it and makes me smile. I put the playlist on shuffle when I don't know what to listen to.

I used to have a single Inbox playlist to save music and keep the date when I saved each song.

This is all separate from my ever-changing genre-specific playlists that I like to maintain and listen to.

I've worked as music editor of a local private radio and there I collected tons of songs after getting rid of my huge and expensive LP archive. Even KTRU allows now digital, they were LP-only for decades.

having worked on the AI Playlist feature at Spotify (which is agentic) -- one thing you can try to prompt is "give me songs that sound <vibe> from my <liked songs | playlist called "X">.

An extension of this is "give me a sequence of N tracks from each of <list of playlist names for each past year> that all evoke <vibe / memory / activity>". Could be a fun prompt to play with

I listen to music as a form of enjoyment, and I can't imagine restricting the music I listen to arbitrarily, for seemingly no gain. To each their own, but it's hard for me to understand how this is making the author happy.

https://github.com/matt-dz/hathr-backend

I've decided to part ways with my physical record collection. Before putting everything up for sale on discogs I decided I will listen and sit through every record I have. Going through each brought back many memories of the times I listened to the record the most. It was enough just to take it into my hands, take it out, look at the cover.

I rarely feel anything like that when I play music via digital means. As if memories _stick_ better on physical mediums.

Sadly, Spotify has decided to remove the subscription tier I was using. I havent really engaged with it since. Just moved on to Audible lmao.

If I ever care enough to try spotify again, I will do just this.