Why I Created a Playlist on Spotify every month for the past 5 years

image credit: Mohammad Metri

Some people love to carefully craft playlists, I’m by no means one of them.

I listen in mostly shuffle-mode from a collection of thousands of songs, so for me is not uncommon to listen Iron Maiden followed by Be Gees, Mozart up next and then again Katy perry.

In March 2015 I started creating a new playlist at the beginning of every month where I save songs I enjoyed to listen that month and continued since.

Ok cool, but why?

I find it fascinating to be able to check what I was listening to in some specific periods of my life and see how different styles of music I listen to

At the start of every month, I listen to the previous years’ playlists for the corresponding month, (this has the interesting side effect that I’m more likely to add songs from prev year to the current month)

What is amazing is that these songs triggers some kind of memories and being in the same time-frame make them revive memories associated with them

Another amazing thing is that listening to songs from Films and Tv Shows I’m able to tell what I watched (or rewatched) that month

Automating the process

Using IFTTT I was able to create a new voice command for google assistant that would pick the phrase “save this song on my monthly playlist” and call an AWS lambda using IFTTT webhooks to save the current song in the appropriate folder using Spotify API

If you are curious these are my lists from previous years in November

Please don’t judge me :D

• November 2015
• November 2016
• November 2017
• November 2018
• November 2019