Oh, damn.
So most of my listening lately has been out of an iTunes Smart Playlist called “not recently overplayed”; it contains all the music in my collection that hasn’t been played or skipped in the last three weeks, and that hasn’t been played more than fifteen times. It’s been part of an attempt to make me go find some new music. Which has sort of worked, sort of not.
I just made its counterpart: a playlist that automatically shows stuff that hasn’t been played or skipped in the last three weeks, but *has* been played more than fifteen times. And holy shit is it full of music I know by heart. All the albums I can halfway play in my head. And a few tracks that have a much higher play-count than the rest of the album because I clearly really like them – or have put them on a manually-curated playlist for some reason.
I should still go Look For New Music now and then. Finding a source for recommendations still kinda feels like work; figuring out how to convince an algorithm to give me music I might enjoy without it just feeding me the same stuff that’s already on my “recently not played but clearly beloved” playlist sounds even more like work.
FWIW, I’m quite a fan of CHIRP Radio, based in north Chicago. It’s a small station, purely volunteer run and funded by donations, so, no corporate influence (beyond quite adorable local ad copy read out by the DJs =:), and most importantly, all the music is genuinely chosen by the DJs because they like it.
Of course, that means you’re more likely to dig certain DJs’ tastes than others – but that seems like a very healthy state of affairs, versus the all too common rigorously researched playlists designed to maximise audience numbers. They’re also very good about accepting requests. ^_^
https://chirpradio.org