Sharing My Psychotic Way of Listening to New Music

I have a habit of delaying pleasure in my life. To each her own, but I’ve come to think of this mindset as the meaning of life. Anticipation is almost always better than the payoff. As a result of this mindset, I’ve changed my listening habits a bit in the past five or so years. I don’t expect anyone will want to follow this, but I’ve loved the results, so I figured I’d share.

Basically, at the start of each new year I start a new playlist on Spotify that I label “[Year in Question] - Anticipated Albums”. Every time an artist/band releases a new album that I really look forward to - either because it gets a ton of critical buzz, or because I already love that artist’s previous work - I add the first song off of the album to the playlist (as a placeholder to remind myself to check it out). Each time I add a song I determine how much I anticipate listening to it, adding my most-anticipated albums at the top, while I’m constantly catching up by checking out the bottom of said list. As I go throughout the year the list grows pretty rapidly. To make this more visually clear, here’s my top ten albums I look forward to listening to the most in 2020 (but haven’t checked out yet):

1.) Perfume Genius
2.) Tame Impala
3.) Destroyer
4.) Grimes
5.) Haim
6.) Real Estate
7.) Hamilton Leithauser
8.) The 1975
9.) Soccer Mommy
10.) Phoebe Bridgers

These won’t necessarily land in my top 50 albums of this year, but they’re all artists whose music I loved in the past.

But I’m also behind in adding music to the list. I’m still reading album reviews from early July. The Microphones’ latest album was release after that, so that album would be placed in my top five most-anticipated, moving Phoebe’s album to 11 (for example).

Around September of each year, I cram all of my most-anticipated albums in the last four months of the year (and into the slow January/February months). This method gives me a ton of music to look forward to.

That's a good system. I generally keep an ongoing Spotify playlist of albums from the current year. Same as you, I just add a single track as a placeholder once the album comes out. Everything on the playlist represents an album I intend to listen to. But inevitably, I listen to some of them right away and others not for a while, so at any given time, it's a mishmash. And by the end of the year, it can get kind of unwieldy to sort through.

I'm curious if you do anything once you've listened to the album? Does it go on a different playlist to help you keep track of what you've heard?

well, if that's psychotic, i fear what my "system" would be labeled as lol

but for real, that actually seems like a pretty efficient system.

I was a little worried about sharing that. Jaymc and Austin - I consider you both ILM all-stars on this forum: thanks for being kind.

Jaymc - That's a great question. I have a three-listen album rule (adjust as needed). Basically, I know my mindset, and I need that three listens to properly evaluate an album. But until I listen to an album at least three times, I keep it where it's at in the "Anticipated Albums" playlist. Once I get past that three-album rule, I make a decision: either I choose to "buy" the album (I still buy CDs of my roughly top-20 albums of a given year), or I put it in another category, which I call "Songs to buy from average albums" - Its a shorthand for albums where I may adore a few songs, but not the whole album.

Basically, over that past five years or so, I've discovered so many albums that I wanted to choose a handful of songs to download, rather than downloading the full album, freeing my album purchases to being albums I'll cherish forever.