Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, and countless other music platforms give users the opportunity to search a wide variety of artists and genres from one location. Of course, it takes a couple of swipes left and right to get exactly where you want to go, but aside from that minor inconvenience, the easy accessibility to music in today's world is ultimately for the best—considering how things were before.
Gone are the days of having to buy one song at a time or drop a significant amount of money for an album you hadn't even heard yet with the very high risk that it might be garbage. With these new musical platforms, users are free from worrying about costs for individual songs and can instead enjoy music at a comfortable monthly rate. As fantastic as that may seem, this is also where the problem begins.
Since music has become so widely accessible, we have become accustomed to mindlessly consuming it without a second thought. Of course, it's great that Spotify and other music platforms are showing us artists beyond our musical peripheral, however, after a while, your music library becomes a jungle of classical, indie, rap, and reggae all rolled into one with absolutely no structure.
It becomes difficult to pick a favorite song in casual conversation because you just know too many. To combat this scatter-brained feeling it is often helpful to construct playlists. Not only will it help you balance your tastes in music, but it's also just really fun to do.
When people think of playlists it's common for the mind to wander first to separating music by genre. Genres are really the first division among all music, so to make a playlist you have to delve a little beyond that. The next most common playlist would be the "Top Ten Most Played" being the songs that you can listen to day in and day out without getting tired of it, regardless of the genre.
Though this may seem like a good idea, this playlist often lets out the rest of the music in your library that you may never get to again once you've started your top ten. There's no real correct way to divide up music but below are some ideas for playlists to help you get started and declutter. Once you have some set playlists, you can choose one for any occasion rather than putting the entire library on shuffle and risk the real embarrassment of playing "Rap God" at a seven-year-old's birthday party.
