Music Listening Patterns

It's obvious from this blog that I think a lot about music and listening to music. I've been this way my entire life but it certainly has become more obsessive and focused since I retired and the especially during this more than a year of pandemic existence. 

I've written about some of my music listening patterns over the past year or so and I thought I would put them all down in one place here.

I've been making long 8 hour mega mixes that have even become longer depending on the music in the mix. So I put a mega mix on and leave it play for days. This also happens in the car where I have a flash drive with lots of big files in the media player. Sometimes I put these mega mixes on shuffle too.

Throughout the first year of the pandemic I was posting a lot about what I called Morning Kitchen Listening although it sometimes went on throughout the day and was often Dinner Kitchen Listening. These were all part of a rotation of CDs that I would bring downstairs from the 3rd floor. I was exploring my collection and listening to some music I hadn't heard in a while. 

When I retired and stopped collecting music I get a subscription to Spotify. One of my uses of Spotify is to highlight to releases. I mostly do this in two ways. First I go to a website like All Music and peruse the new releases each week. Then I look up the ones peak my interest in Spotify and put them in My Albums for further listening. 

I regularly listen to the Spotify weekly playlist for new classical music releases.  It comes out every Friday and I never miss it during the following weekend. Never.

I also listen to the Spotify playlist that are algorithmically generated based on my previous listening. I've used an app that took about a hundred of my mixes from iTunes playlists and migrated them into Spotify so they have a good idea what I like and what I listen to and their playlist are usually spot on.

Another source of music listening for me is going up to the 3rd floor and putting some vinyl albums on the turntable. That is always fun and love doing it. I've been considering bringing the turntable downstairs. It's been a long time.

I listen to a lot of the mixes I've made over the years and not just the recent mega mixes. All of my mixes have been migrated to iTunes and on my iPod. I have them available from a laptop connected to my main stereo that plays throughout the first floor. I also have them on Spotify for access using Bluetooth. Oh, and on my recently purchased Bluetooth speaker.

And iTunes is loaded on all three of my laptops where I can play any of the nearly 15,000 albums on my hard drives which I have several of including backups.

The past few months I found another way to explore my collection using what I call my random album effect which is basically playing albums based on the alphabetical name listing of the album. I usually pick an album I want to hear and then let iTunes keep playing for a few hours. I have iTunes set to list albums by alphabetical order therefore for instance Let It Be by the Beatles would be followed by Let It Be by the Replacements. Makes for some interesting listening and I've been hearing albums I hadn't heard in many years. Occasionally I find something that I wonder why I even have that album in my collection but that doesn't happen very often.

That about covers it for now.