I've been using Spotify since the 27th of June, 2016.

Spotify's recommendation system is pretty good. It has led me to so many kinds of artists, well-known or otherwise. Over the years, I've built a pretty solid library with a wide variety of music.

It's always been hard to answer questions like "What kind of music do you listen to?", and my ever-growing library doesn't help.

So I figured, why not just put whatever's on my Spotify here, and let people decide for themselves?

Top tracks and artists

If you'd like to know what I've been listening to lately, you can see my "top" tracks and artists on Spotify. This covers the songs and artists I listen to the most, in specific periods of time. It's only a small part of my library, so don't use this to judge my music taste! (Though I think for the artists, they're pretty representative.)

See my top tracks See my top artists

Albums

When listening to music, I tend to listen to whole albums from start to finish.

Some albums feel like they are a complete, unique experience on their own. Skipping tracks or shuffling them out of order would kind of ruin the experience.

Most times I even listen to albums from the same artist back-to-back, to the point that I listen to their complete discography in a single sitting.

Some artists are just that good.

So, here are all the albums I've saved to my Spotify library!

See my saved albums

Playlists

To make it easier for me to listen to albums from the same artist, I've made playlists for them. I know, there isn't much value in doing so! You can always just put the albums in a queue instead of making a playlist. That's why I don't really do it anymore these days.

Listening to music this way is such a commitment, though. You can't do it with all artists. Even more so when you just discovered them.

And so I've also started making playlists the "normal" way. By that I mean playlists that don't just contain whole albums. Playlists that contain only a selection of songs from a few albums, from various artists, in no particular order.

Here are all the playlists I've made!

See my public playlists

Saved tracks

In addition to albums, playlist, and artists, Spotify lets you save individual songs to your account. The songs are then saved to a special playlist called "Liked Songs".

The way this feature works has changed over time, though.

Back in the day, if you save an album, all the songs in that album would be saved as well. They changed this sometime in 2019—if you save an album, only the album itself would be saved.

Not sure if that was a good change. As I said, I view each album as a whole, and sometimes I just save the album and listen to it regularly. With the change, the songs in the album won't show up in my "Liked Songs" playlist unless I explicitly save them.

I often use this "Liked Songs" feature when discovering new artists. I would save some of their songs that catch my attention, so that I can easily explore the rest of their discography later.

If an artist really clicks with me, I'll save the albums that I enjoy. The thing is, I tend to not save the songs from then on because I already have the albums saved—I'll just listen from my saved albums.

This might give the impression that I only like a few songs from that artist, when in reality I might have enjoyed their whole discography.

So, the "Liked Songs" playlist is a bit of a mess. I would rather call it "Saved tracks" instead, and in fact that's what they call it in the API. It seems they're changing the heart icon to a plus icon as well. Funny thing is, I vaguely remember it used to be a plus icon before they changed it to a heart icon. Internet even said it was a star before a plus. Eh.

Anyway, Spotify doesn't let you do much with the "Liked Songs" playlist. You cannot rename it. The frustrating thing? It doesn't even let you share the playlist!

That doesn't stop me, though!

See my "Liked Songs" playlist