Approaching music differently; a shift from the playlist to mixtape

Ever since I started really collecting and listening to CDs, my perspective on music has been shifting. I was born during the decline of the CD and the rise of the MP3 player, and as of late, the extreme success of the streaming service. As such, my perception of music has been shifted by those conditions, which manifests into how I have interacted with and experienced music (wow, a Marxist doing material analysis of literally anything, how surprising). As of late, I've been collecting CDs, but my intentions with it were entirely different when I started. At first it was more that I enjoyed having an album I loved in my hands, but as I've been listening to my music on the CDs that I own more often, my perception of music has started to change. Before, I took extreme pride in the fact that I didn't really listen to albums individually, rather I put all of the albums I enjoyed into a playlist that sits at around 2000 songs (122 hours). But I felt a level of fatigue after a while, feeling picky when I'd shuffle the big playlist because, while they were all songs I liked, the next song wasn't what I wanted in that moment. 

To counteract that, I started listening to music as albums more often than not. My playlist became an easier-to-access collection of albums because I was exhausted by the modern playlist format, and listening to my albums on CD these last few months really intensified that. I hardly find myself listening to my big playlist, and I've been thinking about what to do going forward. I've talked about it in bulletins before, but my solution started to arise when I thought about the mixtape I made of the Libyan funk music I found. The CD is an interesting format; 20 tracks or 80 minutes, whatever you reach first. It's not an overwhelming amount of music, but it's still a lot. And so today I made a mixtape of the songs I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I think this is what I'm going to do going forward. And when I get tired of the songs in that mixtape, I make a new, updated one with the songs from albums I've been thinking of. That way, I have a digital record of what I've been listening to over time, yet still grounded in the limits of physical music. I think this also fits well with how I listen to music in general, even before this shift in mentality; I have my core tastes, but the kind of music I listen to shifts throughout the year, from folk to new wave, as a recent example.

I don't know if I'm romanticizing or being nostalgic, but I genuinely think that the playlist-ization of music has degraded the experience of listening to music, and has even affected the releases of new albums. While yes, mixtapes are small playlists, most of my listening takes place in the form of full albums, and the purpose of this is to keep myself a bit more grounded in a media landscape that is so overwhelmingly in your face. When I made my 120 hour long playlist, I only asked my self if I can, but not if I should.

If anyone's curious, here's my current tape's tracklisting:

One Way Or Another - Blondie
Girlfriend Is Better (From Stop Making Sense) - Talking Heads
Terra - Geordie Greep
A Day In the Life - The Beatles
Material Girl - Madonna
Let's Dance - David Bowie
Cosmic Girl - Jamiroquai
Ain't No Crime - Billy Joel
Girls On Film - Duran Duran
Octopus's Garden - The Beatles
Doctor Worm - They Might Be Giants
You Oughta Know - Alanis Morissette
Blueberry Hill - Cristina Vane
"Heroes" - David Bowie
Two for the Price of One - ABBA
Domestic Error - Jesse Welles
Sugar/Tzu - black midi
Bodysnatchers - Radiohead

And I don't know when the next one I make will be, it could be that I'm in a different mood in a few days, or that I'm listening to completely new music in the near future. But either way, I like the idea of this being a "greatest hits" of my current moment than a collection of all the music I listen to.