I got to thinking recently. Why pay $10 or whatever a month for Spotify or Rdio1 when I’ve got 30GB of music on my hard drive that I never listen to? The problem is I open up iTunes, scan through the list of artists and think “I hate all this crap.” But here’s the trick: I don’t hate it all. I just forgot about all the good stuff.
So I started an insane project. I am rating every single song in my iTunes library. The short version of this story is that I’m having a blast and finding a ton of great music I had lost touch with.
There are a few things I’ve done to make this easier.
1) I made a smart playlist that singles out all the unrated music and excludes stuff I don’t care to rate like stand up comedy, movie scores and Christmas music.
2) I’m not rating songs based on good vs. bad, I’m rating them based on whether they belong in a radio-style playlist. In vs. out.
3) My cutoff for “In” is three stars. It’s too mentally challenging to rate every song on a scale of 1 to 5 so I’m really only rating songs “In” or “Out”. “In” songs are three stars and “Out” songs are 2 stars. Only if I have a particularly strong opinion do I bother with giving something 1, 4 or 5 stars.
4) I now have a playlist called “Shawn Radio” with all of my 3 stars and greater songs. It’s an easy go-to when I just want to listen to music but don’t want to decide on a particular album. I know everything in there is going to be pretty good.
Before I started I was curious what percentage of my library would be “Shawn Radio” worthy. So far I’ve rated 536 songs and it’s split almost exactly 50/50. I have 4,032 songs left to rate.
Once I’ve got them all rated I’ll have a good base with which to create other smart playlists. I can siphon off only the 90s alternative or only Hip Hop. Yes, it’s a lot of shit work but I think the payoff will be worth it. Plus, on the way there I get to rediscover a lot of great music.
1 Obviously services like Rdio and Spotify provide value above and beyond what I can harvest from my existing iTunes library but the goal I’m trying to solve right now is finding good music to listen to casually.
