#oneaday Day 955: Continuing the great rebuild

After I wrote the post the other day about "rebuilding" my Spotify library, something suddenly occurred to me: if I were to search by the years in which I was actively buying music on CDs, I would likely be able to track down most of the things I once owned. Although I tended to prefer stuff on the indie side of the spectrum (with occasional dalliances into the most delightfully awful of cheesy pop), so far as my musical tastes went they were nowhere near as… "obscure" or "niche" as my video game tastes, so surely it would be reasonably straightforward.

And it actually was; turns out that Spotify has a series of curated playlists that collect together a bunch of the biggest hits of each year, stretching right back for… well, I didn't test how early it was, but they definitely went back to 1992, which is when I remember buying my first CD (Oasis' Definitely Maybe, which cemented my reputation as being uncool and unaware of anything fashionable by being the CD I purchased literally a single day before its follow-up (What's the Story?) Morning Glory came out) and, as you might expect, continue right up to today.

I mostly focused on adding albums that I definitely owned, but in a few instances I've added some extra ones of artists I remember particularly liking. And I'm pleased with the results; I'm sure there's some albums that I've missed — and there's definitely some compilation CDs that aren't there, since Spotify doesn't do those (though some people have made playlists to "simulate" said compilations, interestingly) but for the most part, looking at my Spotify library now reminds me very much of my classic CD collection: varied and broad, but not so excessively large that I'd only ever end up listening to one or two albums.

That's the trouble with digital music and indeed digital media in general; give yourself too much choice and you end up not picking anything. That's kind of why I wanted to do this little exercise; by limiting myself to things that I know I like (or once liked, at least) I'm more likely to enjoy and appreciate all of it, rather than just treating it as disposable. Because it saddens me how disposable music is considered today — and while I know collecting a bunch of streaming playlists together isn't really doing anything about that, it at least gives me something of a feeling of the "good old days".