10 songs

It all started with an idea and a text to a few friends:

“Yo this is a playlist im starting that im gonna try to update like once a month and keep it pretty short and sweet with my 10 favorite songs atm. Toss a follow if you wanna keep up to date with it”

My goal was to curate a list of my top 10 favorite songs of a given month. I wanted my recommendations to be unique, but also at the same time, authentic. While I wanted this to playlist to be diverse acorss genres, it also had to be an accurate picture of what I was listening to that month.

In addition to sharing the playlist with friends, I thought this would be a good practice for myself. At the very least I would keep an archive of the top songs I liked the most each month.

This is my fifth consecutive month keeping this up, and I have to say, I’m really enjoying it. It’s motivated me to go out of my way to find unqiue songs and actually listen to them consistently. One of my problems is even though I like to listen to new music from a breadth of genres, I’ll forget to come back to new picks and listen to them again. This playlist has helped remedy this problem.

All 10 songs so far...

• Vol 1 (May - June)
• Vol 2 (June - July)
• Vol 3 (July - August)
• Vol 4 (August - September)
• Vol 5 (Current) ¹

Not only that, but I’ve also gotten into playlist sequencing through this process. Wanting to spread out the genres and moods of the songs, I’ve put a lot of thought into the order of the songs, which affect the pacing of the playlist.

A great example of this is my friend Daniel’s take on my idea of the 10 songs, “Soup of the day”. He’s made a couple playlists of his own. I’ve been super impressed with not only his picks, but the way he’s able to curate the pacing of his playlist. If you turn on a 3 second cross fade, it sounds like your listening to one long song. It’s really cool.

Daniel's "Soup of the day" playlists

• Soup of the day (June - July 2024)
• Soup of the day (July 2024 - August 2024)
• Soup of the day (Current)

I’m excited to see where this habit goes and my goal is to have at least a year’s worth of “10 songs” to look back on what I was listening to each month out of the year. Maybe I will do a compliation of all 120 songs, or pick a top 10 of the 120 for the whole year.

I’ve also been adding some of my absolute favorites from each 10 to the reccomendation section of my website. I may even include a note or two about why I like the song so much. You can filter by songs here and see all the songs I’ve added so far. I may have added some that didn’t fit in the 10 songs playlist, but I still really liked.

If you want to keep up with the playlist, you can follow it here. I’ll be updating it once a month, and I’ll change the image of the playlist to indicate that the new 10 songs are up ².

@asboyer

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