My seasonal Spotify playlists
Shortly after I adopted Spotify as my music app of choice in 2015, I started making seasonal playlists to keep track of my favorite songs in a certain year and season.
The result from 5 years of listening & selecting:
- 2015_Autumn
- 2015_Winter
- 2016_Spring
- 2016_Summer
- 2016_Autumn
- 2016_Winter
- 2017_Spring
- 2017_Summer
- 2017_Autumn
- 2017_Winter
- 2018_Spring
- 2018_Summer/Fall (a combined list as my daily patterns got disrupted with my move to the US)
- 2018_Winter
- 2019_Spring
- 2019_Summer
- 2019_Autumn
- 2019_Winter
- 2020_Spring
- 2020_Summer
- 2020_Autumn
- 2020_Winter (work in progress)
Twenty-one playlists in total!
You’ll find an eclectic mix of songs in there. There’s quite a bit of indie rock and electronic indie in there. Electronic indie is probably one of my favorite genres. But you’ll also find (Dutch) hip-hop, tech-house, folk, and pop.
I quite heavily rely on Spotify’s Discover Weekly for spotting new songs. If you’re not familiar with that functionality yet, I encourage you to check it out. You’ll find the Discover Weekly playlist in your list of playlists or on your Homepage. A new Discover Weekly playlist is released every week, containing 30 songs. Spotify’s machine learning (ML) models get to work to find songs you might like. The ML tries to predict this by selecting songs that are in the same or related categories as the songs you already listen to, or that people you have things in common with listen to. You would expect a boring list, but truth is that there is some great variety in the lists I get. Still, of the 30 songs, I end up maybe adding 2 or 3 of them to my seasonal playlists. If you want to learn more about Spotify’s ML, check out this article.
My absolute favorite thing to do is to listen back to my old playlists that I made in the same season. Currently, I am listening my 2016_Winter playlist.
And on some days, when it’s rainy and dark outside, I venture outside of my season to catch some sunny tunes to lighten up the day!
You can find this and other stories on my website www.thalein.com.
