brilliant !
― canoon fooder (dog latin), Tuesday, 1 December 2015 11:30 (eight years ago) link
Okay, so this is done. I have a few thoughts on the experience of spending a year on this project that I’d like to share with you, a few words about how I intend to utilize this work and how I plan to replicate the project in 2016.
First and foremost, let's share the final genre playlists and their accompanying threads. The link to the genre discussion thread title is in bold and, where the thread title is sufficiently circumlocutory or not entirely up front, explanation in italics follows of useful details and just what the thread covers.
Rolling Favorite Tracks + Albums 2015Rolling Favorite Tracks 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
rolling pop thread 2015Rolling Pop 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
K-pop (2015) (predominantly Korean pop but some other Chinese and Japanese pop as well)Rolling K-Pop 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
rolling CORP low bar just to appear hip to teens thread 2015 (Rolling Hip Hop Thread)Rolling Hip Hop 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
R&B 2015Rolling R&B 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
rolling dancehall & reggae 2015Rolling 2015 Dancehall and Reggae Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling Outernational Non-West Non-English (Some Exceptions) 2015 Thread Once Known as World MusicRolling Global and ‘Outernational’ Thread 2015 Spotify Playlist
Rolling Afro-Latin Music 2015 and onward: Salsa, Bomba, Merengue,Reggaeton, Bachata, Latin-Jazz and moreRolling Latin and Afro-Latin 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
"Weird Means Something You Never Heard Before": Rolling Jazz D-bag Thread 2015Rolling Jazz 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling Afrobeats / Afropop 2015 threadRolling Afrobeats and Afropop 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Techno / House Bobbins 2015Rolling Techno and House 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling Country 2015Rolling Country 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling 2015 Indie Rock/Pop Thread - Bring Your Bulldozers; Time to Plow the Landfill for Great Indie Rock!Rolling Indie Rock 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
grime in 2015 (hip hop and trap production from the UK)Rolling Grime 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling Eastern European Pop 2015Rolling Eastern Euro Pop 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling 2015 Goth / Post-Goth / Darkwave / Dark Neopostpunk / Deathrock etc. etc. Thread!Rolling Goth 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
rolling punk/non-indie underground 2015Rolling Punk 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling non-US rap thread 2015Rolling Non-US Rap 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Guy/Gal With a Guitar (Or Anything Else): Rolling Folk/Singer-Songwriter/Americana Thread 2015Rolling Folk and Singer-Songwriter 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
rolling emo/pop-punk/bullshit/haircuts 2015Rolling Emo and Pop Punk 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, 11 January 2016 08:12 (eight years ago) link
Additionally, there were several threads that were geared toward specific user taste. They ran as follows:
Johnny Fever's Not Pop Not Indie Shambhala 2015 (Somewhat lyrical alt-pop, predominantly female artists)Rolling Shambhala 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
time travel 2015 -> 2012 <-> 2102 <-5102 levart emit (iconoclastic art-pop)Rolling Time Travel 2015 2012 2102 5102 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
I heard this in 2015, I liked it (grab bag)Rolling I Heard This in 2015, I Liked It In 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling 'One Track Per Week' Thread 2014 (more grab bag, playlist starts from first 2015 post)Rolling One Track Per Week 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
rolling fuck this shit worst songs of 2015 thread Rolling Worst Songs of 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
it's not Summer without your Jams - 2015Rolling Summer Jams2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Also, there was a yearly metal thread that was so active and expansive that I was unable to diligently maintain a playlist. Even so,135 songs were collaboratively wrangled from the thread and it deserves inclusion here.
Rolling Metal Thread 2015Rolling Metal 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Finally, I built playlists for all the nominated tracks for ILM’s yearly best track and album polls. For the album nominees, I pulled two or three tracks from each disc and put them into an album sampler playlist.
ILM's 2015 End of Year Albums & Tracks Poll / NOMINATIONS THREAD
Rolling Best of the Year Track Nominations 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
Rolling Best of the Year Album Nominations Sampler 2015 Thread Spotify Playlist
and FINALLY finally, the following big daddy is the playlist which includes ALL of the above playlists: genre, personal and Best of 2015 nominees. There are copious doubles, which I’ll endeavor to clean up in time, but it should still ultimately end up about 7500+ total tracks long.
ILX Listens - The Complete Playlists Playlist for 2015 - Spotify Playlist
^ THIS monstrosity, along with a handful of other selections, is going to be the core of my own collaborative music engagement project for 2016. I’ll post a new thread shortly with more info once I have a moment, but long story short is that I’m gonna try to work through this pile of tunes over the course of the next 12 months and I’d love to have any interested people join me for as long as you'd like so we can discuss tracks in mutual play.
― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, 11 January 2016 08:13 (eight years ago) link
For clarification on my non-affiliation with Spotify and to reiterate my earlier rationale for limiting this to one freemium/paid service:
Spotify is hardly the be-all-end-all of music indices and it is often notably less au courant than say, YouTube or soundcloud, which makes finding immediate hip hop or electronic dicey, but it has the added benefit of being very easy to search and manage, free and/or cheap, available in multiple countries and it just happens to be the service I lean on for at least 75% of my listening. It is also a service that makes subscription to playlists (and autoupdating/downloading tracks to a mobile playlist) easy.
Some conceivably helpful parting footnotes: - These playlists reflect America's accessible spotify catalogue only; if you are listening to these playlists outside of the US, you may have access to tracks we do not and vice versa.- That said, if you find a significant omission or if Spotify adds an album or single to the service in the future, feel free to bump any of the accompanying threads and I'll try to update the playlist. - This curatory work is not intended to be proprietary; feel free to recopy listings to your own mixes or share wherever you'd like. Information wants to be free and Spotify wants to be ten bucks a month.- Whenever albums are discussed, I have sought representative tracks, generally those that are listed as the most played on Spotify. - In some instances where an artist is discussed and the song or album in question is not available on the streaming service, I will instead post other representative music from the same artist, but I have strived to make sure that music is from a 2015 release or, rarely, 2014. - Eagle eyed track editors will note that not strictly every song in these playlists hails from 2015 or late 2014; on certain threads and playlists, tracks from far earlier periods are part of the discussion and, where appropriate, I have included those songs. IMO, obsession can be good for you, needless consistency, not so much.
And let’s talk about obsession: I’ve mentioned elsewhere on ILX that this (entirely self-imposed) project has fired off some major OCD tendencies in me over the course of the past year. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night to scan bookmarks and occasionally shirking work in preference of updating this strange and winding monster. This unpaid combo of never ending immediate deadline and impossibly easy procrastination fodder never strayed too far from my forebrain. I find indexing simultaneously calming and anxiety-inducing; the only way to keep potential freak outs at bay was to just add A FEW MORE to the pile. I’d like to continue doing a version of this project for the ILX community in the upcoming year as it’s a great way to get a broad overview of what’s contemporary in each of these genres but I’ve got to shift my approach or else I am going to stoke my neuroses higher than I can jump... so for 2016, I’ll be fully updating all playlists on a monthly basis only, starting in early February. I’ll bump the respective genre thread when everything is updated (which I hope will not be too egocentric or distracting) and will start a "Listening to ILX Listen - 2016" thread so that there's once again a hub to access and join in both playlists and discussion.
Without begging for tips, I feel compelled to say again that this project was HARD WORK... more than I could've imagined and certainly enough to have prevented me from starting had I known the arduousness of the task. Though I've absolutely gotten something out of the experience, it's not something I would do so publicly unless I thought it was both helpful for and appreciated by a plurality of the population here. Kind words and commiseration at this journey's end would be appreciated.
And hey, Glenn and Stet and any code kiddies! If you can create a script or something that automates what I'm trying to do here, boy would I ever welcome it!
Happy listening.
2015 was a golden year - certainly my best year for new music in a very long time - so it's great that you have constructed this towering memorial!
― mike t-diva, Monday, 11 January 2016 08:23 (eight years ago) link
hopefully a living memorial! this stuff needs to breathe for us to figure out what's the dross and what's the gold.
― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, 11 January 2016 08:25 (eight years ago) link
I don't use Spotify and tracks playlists are not really how I listen to music anyway but I'm very admirative of the work accomplished here.
― moans and feedback (Dinsdale), Monday, 11 January 2016 13:37 (eight years ago) link
Thanks for all of the hard work!
― schwantz, Monday, 11 January 2016 15:44 (eight years ago) link
u crazy forks
― Spottie, Monday, 11 January 2016 18:04 (eight years ago) link
And hey, Glenn and Stet and any code kiddies! If you can create a script or something that automates what I'm trying to do here, boy would I ever welcome it!Happy listening.― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, January 11, 2016 8:13 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, January 11, 2016 8:13 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
This is definitely possible - have you tried using Ivy?
― Vote! In the ILM EOY Poll! (seandalai), Monday, 11 January 2016 21:11 (eight years ago) link
not yet, but exploring it now... I gather it would require everyone to tag songs for inclusion?
― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, 11 January 2016 21:18 (eight years ago) link
If not, there would need to be some kind of smart script that could parse through a thread and try to extract Artist/Track text. This sounds like a job for Google or something. I like the idea of creating a tag/format for rolling music threads, though!
― schwantz, Monday, 11 January 2016 21:20 (eight years ago) link
thx for the effort forks, I signed up for spotify for your lists!
― niels, Monday, 11 January 2016 21:35 (eight years ago) link
You'd just have to copy/paste "Artist - Track" lines from the thread into a big file - obviously some manual work but maybe less than searching Spotify for each and every one.
Beyond that, yes you could write a script to extract these lines from a thread, could get as fancy as you'd like really.
― Vote! In the ILM EOY Poll! (seandalai), Monday, 11 January 2016 23:18 (eight years ago) link
well, as the guy who just did this, I can tell you that people regularly misspell the names of the tracks or the artists and spotify often mislabels them. I had to do a great deal of digging to find quite a lot of this. I don't think it's unrealistic to say that automating the process might lose as much as 30% of what I found with a little intuition and boolean skill.
― Copy rights, pleasing all star wars fans, hiring professionals. (forksclovetofu), Monday, 11 January 2016 23:24 (eight years ago) link
Listening to ILX Listen: 2016
― ulysses, Wednesday, 3 February 2016 22:30 (eight years ago) link