Tag: spotify (page 1 of 1)

a construction engineer holding and reviewing blueprints

December 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

How I Made My 2025 Music Recap

I spent most of my free time over the last week turning twelve months of Last.fm scrobbles into something resembling what I might get from the digital music streaming platforms. The goal was to achieve narrative clarity about how my listening habits are shaped by genre, vibe, purpose, and pattern.

Two things became obvious fast:

The raw data is messy. Pulling a year of listening into a meaningful shape requires way more cleaning, classification, and context than I had done since switching from Spotify to Tidal. I’m not Every Noise at Once.
The story isn’t in the numbers alone. Meaning can’t be easily derived from play counts alone.

I wanted to be a more intentional listener this year, leaving Spotify’s algorithmic overreach for a more human, artist-centric product experience in Tidal. I achieved that. Now, if I feel like I’m in a rut, I can’t really blame the technology. I have to work my way out of it. Building more playlists helps with that, as does trying out more of the user playlists that the platform’s home page surfaces to me.

The Sources

Three inputs shaped the foundation:

Last.fm scrobble history for every play, including timestamps and track-level breadcrumbs.
My own tags and taxonomies:
This year, I built an artist descriptor system to replace Last.fm’s chaotic tag soup. I capped it at three genres and two descriptors per artist. For songs, I added a mood and a mode. I’m sure both dictionaries will expand in 2026.
Context logs:
I tracked my weekly and monthly top performers, which made it easier to tie shifts in listening to what was happening in my own life.

The Tools

A Last.fm data exporter. The one I used always pulls your full history (though you can download partial fills during the process). I’ve found another that allows you to draw an update based on a timestamp. I’ll be using it going forward unless I come across something better.
Google Sheets for merging, normalizing, and verifying counts.
A personal KPI tracker to keep genre weights, album totals, and monthly shifts consistent.
ChatGPT as an analyst assistant, primarily for structuring and processing data logs, similar to how I use AI to assist me at work, where I also have limited resources. It helped me think through how I wanted to set up a data analysis framework, and then I implemented it in tools outside the LLM that aren’t prone to hallucination, bad math, or fantasy. One area I intend to explore early in the new year is AI solutions explicitly designed for data analysis and exploration. I’ve gotten to play around with these kinds of tools in some enterprise products and marketing analytics tools, which I’ve found exciting and delightful, but as I have noted throughout this year, making this stuff work requires a ton of thoughtful setup under the hood.

The Structure

45 Descriptors (like 1980s or Underground or The South)

19 Genres (like Hip-Hop, Funk, or K-Pop)

12 Moods (like Cinematic, Energetic, or Spiritual)

12 Modes (like New Day Vibes, Working Out, or Still Processing)

I enjoy the classification process despite (or perhaps because) how challenging and time-consuming it is. I learned during my Paramount+ days that building a single, consistent metadata system is hard, and few want to own it.

I get it. It’s daunting to take on this task even if you’re the lone customer, but c’est la vie.

The Playlists

I do a lot more playlist management on Tidal than I ever did on Spotify, and this process has encouraged me to create more playlists.

Colorful gradient background featuring the text 'NEW DAY Vibes' curated by Jason Toney

Cover art for a music playlist titled 'THE COOL DOWN', featuring a cosmic-themed illustration of a purple planet surrounded by stars, with the subtitle 'music for heavy eyelids' and curated by Jason Toney.

You can find all my publicly available playlists on my profile.

The Stats

42.6k streams
17.3k tracks
9.8k albums
5.2k artists
~53% of my spins this year were categorized.

Top Artists

Top Albums

A grid of album covers showcasing popular tracks including 'GNX' by Kendrick Lamar and 'Let God Sort Em Out' by Clipse, along with their respective play counts.

The 2025 Mixtape

Improvements for 2026

On Saturday morning, I spun up a BigQuery project connected to a Google Colab notebook so I can process my Last.fm data at scale. Each month, I’ll ingest new scrobbles, update artist and song classifications, and sync them all to my active playlists.

The goal is 80% classification over the next 12 months. I want a much more comprehensive understanding of my listening patterns, defined on my terms.

The one data point I’m still missing: song length. The public metadata ecosystem is thin, and time-listened has become the backbone metric of every streaming recap. Getting accurate, open song-duration data may be an uphill battle.

Is it weird that I have been having a lot of fun nerding out on this little data project?

A young man on a busy city street with headphones on and a backpack. Only the back of his head is visible but he appears to be enjoying what he is listening to.

February 8, 2025 / 1 Comment

Escaping Spotify: My Month of Intentional Listening with TIDAL

On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time.

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier.

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase.

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle.

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.

January 6, 2025 / 1 Comment

Switch

What’s the most ethical way to listen to digital music?

By ethical, which major services pay the fairest royalty to artists and music rights owners on a per-play basis? Spotify has been the most prominent digital music provider for years, and they have used that position to pay less than their competitors. They also are increasingly doing what tech companies tend to do when they begin to dominate the industry they are disrupting: find ever more creative ways not to pay people.

The collective disappointment with this year’s Wrapped—including me—has sparked a drumbeat of social media users reminding us that there are services that treat artists better than Spotify and provide more value for their customers if higher audio quality is your thing. TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music can all make this claim.

An infographic explaining streaming royalty rates, including a bar chart that shows that Tidal pays out the best while Deezer pays the worst, and several factoids about the state of music industry revenue

credit: ProducerHive

I have requirements beyond the baseline of a good digital music service—catalog size, playlist diversity, personalization, and audio quality. The most important of which is relatively niche: integration with Last FM. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m a bit obsessive about capturing my listening data, and this year’s Spotify Wrapped hammered home the need to continue to have a solution independent of the digital streamers.

That requirement severely limits my options as few services natively integrate with last.fm anymore. I could make it work if I only listened to music via iTunes or a web browser. Still, I regularly switch between my laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and so, despite having access to all of the major services in some form via bundles I pay for, they won’t work for me in this case. [ed. Note—we’ll need to examine the value of these bundles in the future.]

It’s frustrating that this is the case, but I don’t mind shifting to TIDAL. I’ve used the service before. They pay the best per stream of all the major digital music providers. They have the highest quality audio. It should be a no-brainer, but I have used Spotify so much over the decade since the death of rdio that I have gotten used to the things they provide.

A Pay table with three columns—Streaming Platform, Royalty Rates (per stream), and Streams Required to make $1. It only requires 78 streams to make $1 from Tidal Music while it takes 314 to achieve the same on Spotify.

credit: ProducerHive

But I’m listening right now, and the music sounds excellent. The transition felt daunting initially, but playlist transfer was easy thanks to TuneMyMusic (though why they require a subscription is bewildering. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Charge me once or on a per-usage basis). Within a couple of hours, I started to find my way. TIDAL has human-curated playlists like New West Coast, Women of Hip-Hop, New Arrivals: Hip-Hop and R&B, Grown Rap, Real Love: Best New R&B, R&B Hits, and Pop&B that are fair proxies for the mostly ML-based recommendation playlists that I used on Spotify. As I listen to more music, the home page is refining and showing relevant playlists, artists, songs, and albums I will likely explore.

My Tidal home feed has sections for Suggested new albums, recently updated curated playlists, user playlists I might like, and albums it thinks I might want to revisit.

After using TIDAL exclusively this weekend, personalized music mixes appeared on my home page feed this morning.

My Tidal home feed has sections for custom mixes, my favorite artists, recommended new music, and curated Essentials playlists from artists I might want to get to know better.

There were some mishaps. I lost some song scrobbles because I didn’t check if I had to sign in to Last.fm on every device where I am using TIDAL (I do). Track-level data cleanup will be an ongoing concern, but I learned that I can correct metadata mistakes from TIDAL’s scrobbles to Last.fm by editing a track at the scrobble level. The cool thing is that when I correct that data, Last.fm allows me to correct previous scrobbles and set it so future appearances of that track will be automatically updated to the proper naming conventions. What a revelation! For example, I was able to go back and update scrobbles from when Kendrick Lamar’s GNX first dropped—before the featured artists were included in the track name—and fix those so I have an accurate count of how many times I have listened to dodger blue (feat. wallie the sensei, siete7x, roddy ricch) and peekaboo (feat. AzChike).

Fewer algorithmic playlists mean more active and intentional listening, and intention is IN for 2025. I’m tired of being tricked by convenience into being passive in so many things in my life. I want my brain to make more choices about things that matter to me, like what I’m listening to and why. I want my values to be the driving factor in where and how I spend money and time.

If you’re on TIDAL, you can find me here.

Where do you listen?

Banner Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash

December 5, 2024 / 2 Comments

Spotify Wrapped 2024: Not Handled with Care

Dr. Georgie Carroll, an Australian fan Engagement Expert, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that “Spotify Wrapped learned a hard lesson today: data isn’t enough.”

Indeed. The true value of data lies in the connections we find and the stories we tell. In the past, Spotify’s human curators would weave these narratives, aligning the recap with the cultural and musical zeitgeist, rather than just showcasing the Company’s technological prowess.

For example, using the Musical Evolution Cards as a starting point, I delved into my journals, my last.fm profile, and my memories to piece together a narrative that was more than just a jumble of words and AI-generated podcasts.

I’m a fan of NotebookLM and its potential as a research tool, but the podcast creation here was nothing more than a parlor trick. Until AI can approximate a lived experience that reflects and remixes what it has learned about me and finds something more profound, it is nothing more than soulless novelty.

I want two things from any recap of my content consumption:

A map of my year that might reveal something that I wouldn’t otherwise see or remember as it was happening
Breadcrumbs that might inform where I should go next in my entertainment journey

Since its launch, Wrapped has been good at showing listeners where they sit in audience clusters on the service. It’s one of the reasons I lament the degradation of The “Sounds of Spotify” playlists over the last 12 months. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped told me what genres I most enjoyed (with increasing nuance and specificity), and they had playlists that showcased the core sound, pulse, and outer bounds of those genres that I could dig into and follow. New and old music would funnel my way through those algorithmically driven curations and they had a strong hit rate for my ears.

They laid off the person who created Every Noise at Once, the algorithm that powers those playlists, right after Wrapped was released last year. So, 2024 Wrapped features none of those breadcrumbs that would have been generated by this lovingly managed cluster model. Instead, I turned to last.fm again to see if I could determine my preferred genres and subgenres. It’s not nearly the same, but we make do.

With a little effort, I can see that neo-soul, female vocalists, West Coast hip hop, Memphis hip hop, and electronic dance grooves were my genres of choice this year.

When I look to refine and expand my listening in 2025, jazz, including nu-jazz, alt-rnb, post-rock, and LA hip-hop, are subgenres I should explore further.

As tech companies in media trend towards investing in the promise of future tech over people with taste and a fundamental grounding in the living world, we must seek out the storytellers on our own.

I love data, and I love stories. Thanks to last.fm for allowing me to tell my own story independent of digital music platforms. They are not a sponsor of this post, but I have been a fan and a user for nearly 20 years.

April 14, 2024 / 1 Comment

Am I an AI Skeptic or Optimist? Yes

I’m an AI skeptic. That’s not true. I have been cautious about rapidly incorporating AI tools into my everyday work, even as usage and excitement by others have grown exponentially in the last year.

Recently, though, I’ve been playing with AI solutions more frequently. I’ve been frustrated with the quality of Google search results and started exploring Perplexity AI. It was helpful when I looked up information in the heat of NCAAW March Madness and appreciated the structure of the results and the linked references to validate what was provided quickly. There were instances where I needed it to go deeper or in a different direction, but, in general, it felt like I was training up a new research assistant than my future overlord. But, just a few days after using it as my primary search tool, Casey Newton revealed they plan to add sponsored questions into the mix—the exact kind of nonsense I’d been hoping to avoid.

That same week, Axios AI+ and other outlets released several articles highlighting my AI concerns:

AI firms think that anything publicly available is fair game. Like many, I’m stuck on the ethical challenges in developing every one of these models. Most, if not all, ignore their policies, the terms of service of other brands, and copyright law as they scrape the internet for inputs and training materials. We make limited series and movies about how problematic startup and disruptor business culture is, yet we’re watching it happen all over again.

In general, I think most content-generating AI models make shitty art—though just yesterday, people debated whether a leaked diss track from Drake was real or robot rapping—but it is scary enough for over 200 musicians to protest against AI tech developers collectively. Just because I think most of it is soulless and disturbing if you spend more than just a little bit of time with prompt-rendered images, video, and music, that doesn’t mean bad actors and unskilled keyboard jockeys won’t flood the zone with junk. I have already experienced this with real humans making generic beats while borrowing old vocal tracks from established artists to get into Release Radar and other algorithm-generated playlists on Spotify every week. 99% of these tracks are trash and—I must assume—not benefitting the artists whose coattails they are trying to ride.

Meanwhile, AI is doing little of what we imagine it is. It’s not running the Whole Foods walk-in/walk-out stores. And despite the many influencers I see—and probably muted—who talk about using AI to replace entire chunks of their jobs, this is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

We’re exploring AI solutions for business intelligence use cases on my team. Specifically, analysts are using corporate-sanctioned tools to ease the analysis and reporting burden of A|B tests as they increase at a faster rate than the size of our team. AI is a good assistant, but it still requires review and validation. It hallucinates less as our prompt writing adapts to the outputs—note, as we adjust to it and not so much as it adapts to us—but humans are still required as a critical part of the process and will continue to be.

Despite all of these concerns, I’m not afraid of AI. I’m an optimist and inclined to think about artificial intelligence tools as more like the droids in Star Wars: brilliant assistants who are constantly in service of what sentient beings are trying to do.

Let’s ignore General Grievous and his droid army in this metaphor.

The prequels aren’t very good, anyway.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

December 28, 2023 / 1 Comment

Things Will Get Better – 2023 in Music

In October, a new and unexpected routine developed in my life. I was driving to and from medical facilities to visit my father, who had gone in to be treated for pneumonia that ultimately turned into a tracheostomy. On those drives, I first turned to Spotify-powered “Uplifting” mixes—even going Gospel on occasion—but eventually that commute became the daily spin of Cleo Sol’s Gold in its entirety.

As a primary vocalist in Sault and in her solo work, Sol has always explored her spirituality in her records, but Gold stays focused on the role her God plays in her life. It’s a Christian-oriented faith, but the songs are non-denominational. I’m apathetic towards religion, but I’m a sucker for praise music, especially when I’m seeking to fill my heart with generosity, empathy, joy, and hope.

When I was pulling into a hospital or clinic parking lot, Cleo was belting that things would improve, and I believed her.

My album of the year.

When I combine Cleo Sol’s solo work with all my spins of Sault, she’s my most listened-to artist of 2023, beating out Beyoncé, whose Renaissance continued, and De La Soul, who finally came to streaming after decades of battling with their record label.

Jungle, however, is my selection for artist of the year. By the time Volcano came out in August, I was already in love with nearly half of the tracks. Candle Flame, Dominoes, Problemz, and others had all been released throughout the year and became frequent selections on a variety of my playlists. Then, they spent the rest of the year releasing videos for every song on the album that work together as a short film/musical. Tom McFarland and Josh Lloyd-Watson have worked with many of the same dancers since their first album, and Volcano is a showcase for the power of that loyalty and community. They even went viral with the dancing and vibe of Back on ’74.

They understood the assignment.

Speaking of vibes, I loved internet sensations. My mixtape features TikTok hits like 6000 Degrees (AH HA) by $hyfromdatre, Eat it Up by Lil Vada, You Wish by Flyana Boss, Lovin on Me by Jack Harlow, and Water by Tyla.

I felt my connection to contemporary hip-hop slipping away this year. While it was my top genre of 2023, much of that was revisiting older stuff. Sure, give me a J. Cole or Cardi B feature. I’m down for bars from Doja Cat‘s problematic personage to go with the many women out here rapping right now. Still, no 2023 release is among my albums of the year, and my top artists lean toward Indie Soul, Alternative R&B, and, increasingly, afrobeat/afro-futurist.

Afrofuturism. That’s how I’d describe my relationship to music in 2023. Looking forward and back with an appreciation for sounds that come from and are for the soul. Give me tunes that ignite and inspire. Dance with my inner optimist. I’ll headbang, head nod, and even cry to the beat so long as it’s in the service of a tomorrow that improves upon today.

Things will get better.

Albums of the year

Gold by Cleo Sol
Volcano by Jungle
The Age of Pleasure by Janelle Monáe
Guts by Olivia Rodrigo
Angels & Queens (Deluxe) by Gabriels
Falling or Flying by Jorja Smith
Buhloone Mindstate (Reissue) by De La Soul

Also, check out Golden by Jung Kook, Slugs of Love by Little Dragon, Jaguar II by Victoria Monét, Happiness by Dargz and Homegrown by Carrtoons

Artists of the year (that haven’t already been mentioned):

Jessie Ware, Hannah Jadagu, Allison Russell, Adi Oasis, Izo FitzRoy, Kelela, and Okvsho

How I listened in 2023

Spotify is my music app of choice. I maintain an all-time top 100 and a top 100 for each year. On Saturdays, I refresh my top 40 playlist, create a new playlist to drive my listening for the coming week, and explore music with my Release Radar and X by doing Y playlist. I regularly update two exercise playlists: Close Your Rings and an ultimate workout mix. On Wednesdays, I let the Spotify algorithm drive my listening with the AI DJ and the Daylist.

If your app doesn’t connect with last.FM, I can’t use it. I love my stats too much.

December 5, 2021 / 0 Comments

A Good Liar and the other best links of the week

“Here I am lying again on some level, which I promised I wouldn’t do—and I’m lying in some ways to the person I love most.”

– Stephen Glass in Bill Adair’s incredible essay on who the disgraced journalist became in the two decades since being outed as a fabulist. It’s worth giving up your email address to read.

Kim Mulkey is not among my favorite college basketball coaches. Michelle Voepel’s illuminating profile, however, gives a lot more insight into the whole person she is and showcases why her players tend to ride so hard for her. Baylor should’ve put her name on the court.

“I became aware that inside of their performance, inside of their music, there was a performance that had to do with identity. They were playing with gender; they were upending expectations. It’s the idea that, in a perfect world, we should be allowed to create, with real freedom and with flexibility, who we want to be.”

– Tessa Thompson in Wesley Lowery’s Ebony Magazine Cover story

“It is true the traditional financial system has not provided access, and frankly exploited Black people,” said Darrick Hamilton, professor of economics and urban policy at the New School. “But the remedy isn’t to turn to another vulnerable system, however well-intended it may or may not be. The remedy is a public sector that ensures they have access in an equitable way.”

Despite the valid concerns, I love the Spotify algorithm. It is, by far, my most used digital service.

Speaking of music, spoiler that the Live at the BBC compilation of Amy Winehouse performances will be among my top albums of the year. I hope this exhibit gets to travel to the US.

Let your leisure time be leisure time, y’all.

December 15, 2018 / 0 Comments

2018 in Music

“Miss me with that bullshit. You ain’t really wild, you a tourist. I be blackin’ out with the purest.”

— Kendrick Lamar

Unapologetically black. That’s how I liked my music this year. Not just black, per se, (though that was where my head was tbh) but unapologetically whatever it was trying to be. That could be unapologetically pop. Unapologetically fun. Unapologetically woke. Whatever. Just make me feel like it’s real, that I’m real, that who I am and what I am is not only okay but brilliant.

King’s Dead did that for me from its very first notes. Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, James Blake, and Future with my favorite of all the songs on the epic Black Panther Album (Music from and Inspired by the Movie) is ultimately a villain’s anthem but one that reeks of authenticity. It sounds like California. Black California from the bay to the South of LA. When Jay Rock says, “My name gon’ hold up. My team gon’ hold up,” I feel that shit.

My last.fm charts will say that All the Starz from the same album is my top track, but it’s treating King’s Dead from the Black Panther album and Jay Rock’s Redemption as two separate tracks. Combined, it’s close to 100 spins.

The 2018 Mixtape

My methodology this year for figuring out my faves was to look at each month separately rather than focus on my listens in aggregate though those numbers were a secondary factor. My mixtape reflects my favorite song of each month from January through November as well as my favorite discovery.

I like this approach better because it acknowledges the rhythms of time more than the inertia of routine and the impact of the Spotify algorithms on my listening behavior. So instead of seeing a playlist dominated by a few albums and artists, you’ll hear some tracks that I forgot I loved right next to the records that I played the hell out of for a few weeks at a time. There’s a little symmetry here as well with a song featuring Sza—artist of my favorite track of 2017—and ends with a song by Janet Jackson who I have admired since I was knee-high and who just got nominated for the Rock & Roll hall of fame. She’s still got it.

The Albums

I haven’t looked at many of the end-of-year lists yet, so I don’t know what the consensus is around the top releases though I’m guessing some of my faves like Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy are on them. I know they are both GRAMMY nominated for Album of the Year. They weren’t my very top albums this year despite trying hard to convince myself otherwise.

Black Panther—both the compilation mentioned above and the Ludwig Göransson score—set the tone for everything I would listen to for the rest of the year. It primed me for Jay Rock’s full length, an artist I wasn’t checking for before King’s Dead and his instant anthem WIN which was the theme for the LA Sparks season well before it was played at nearly every sporting event the rest of the year. The score re-ignited my interest in film compositions which led to an April filled with the soundtracks to Arrival and Annihilation and Westworld and many a Black Mirror episode. Combined, Kendrick Lamar’s curated playlist for the best black popcorn movie ever released and that score was the best thing going all year. Full stop.

Beyond that, I enjoyed grown folks hip hop from Beyoncé and her husband and Phonte. I liked expansive sounds from The Midnight Hour and Abstract Orchestra, clever reworks from Kelela, and a pretty perfect pop album from Ariana Grande who is, perhaps, an even more interesting artist than she is a celebrity. She, too, is figuring out how to be unapologetically herself with each release.

My Fave Albums of 2018

Black Panther Album & Black Panther Soundtrack
Redemption – Jay Rock
Dirty Computer – Janelle Monae
Everything is Love – The Carters
Invasion of Privacy – Cardi B
No News is Good News – Phonte
The Midnight Hour – The Midnight Hour
Sweetener – Ariana Grande
TAKE ME A_PART, THE REMIXES – Kelela
Dilla – Abstract Orchestra

Other Notes

Shout-out to Drake for great singles and better videos. Jordan Rakei, Nightmares on Wax, and Little Dragon for great live shows. Rapsody, Gifted Gab, Noname and Princess Nokia for providing excellent counter-programming to the overwhelming masculinity and aggression still dominating popular hip-hop. And Aretha Franklin and Mac Miller for having existed.

Thank u, next.

The Raw Data

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September 2, 2013 / 0 Comments

Turn your Rdio Up

“Round and round, round in circles.” – Myron & E, Going in Circles

I’m listening to Heavy Rotation radio on Rdio this morning as I write this post. A track from Shigeto’s latest album is playing. The Heavy Rotation radio station plays music that is being played regularly in my network of friends on the streaming music service.

I dig it.

I’ve been a hardcore Spotify user for, at least, the past two years. I tried both it and Rdio a couple summers ago and found Rdio lacking at the time. If I remember correctly, Rdio didn’t have a library as large as Spotify’s and didn’t have the user penetration that Spotify had so the social features, which were and still are, better, didn’t do it for me.

But the music heads amongst my friends have stuck with Rdio over that time and have been increasingly singing it’s praises so, for the month of September, I’m giving the service another go ’round.

First Thoughts:

The apps and interface are really elegant.
The social aspects are much stronger than Spotify’s and put in your face a lot. I like that. One of my favorite things is knowing what my friends are really listening to in charts and such. This is something Spotify has started to bury with their new discover tab. I appreciate this difference here.
I miss the ability to “star” tracks but maybe I don’t need that here
This isn’t Rdio’s fault but re-creating playlists is a pain in the ass anytime you switch music services. So is the process of getting these services to learn your changing musical peculiarities. Familiarity is a powerful reason to stick with something even if better options are out there.

You can find me on Rdio.

Any tips for the newbie?