My 2019 Musical Diary

Aside from tracking my reading, I also tracked my listening this 2019. Tracking what music I listen to achieve two things:

  1. It made me want to discover new music regularly.
  2. It showed me my taste of music.

The idea for creating a musical diary came from this post from Austin Kleon. Following his example, I created two new playlists on Spotify at the beginning of 2019. I named the first playlist just “2019”…

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2A03RdcU54LWVGlN1vQCC8?si=zYrdaEe5Sc2JVSJK6Hv4aA

and the second, “OPM 2019”.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7AYEtNdTCNqgMAUcCU3EC7?si=cKQ5-7PS_mrqT1auhCSdw

Every time I listened to a new song or an old favorite, I saved the song to either playlist. If it’s a song by a Filipino artist, it goes to “OPM 2019”. If it’s from an international artist, it goes to “2019”. This way, I was able to make sure I was listening to both local and international music.

It was personally enlightening to know that I listened to a wide variety of genres. However, I really found close affinity with songs that were written as standalone poems like those by Bill Callahan, Gil Scott-Heron, Bullet Dumas, Hozier, and Nick Cave.

Yesterday, before I started washing the dishes, I opened Spotify and created two new playlists: “2020” and “OPM 2020”. I played the new Munimuni version of “Minsan”. After listening to it (and liking it), I stopped washing, cleaned my hands, and added the song to “OPM 2020” thus beginning my first musical diary of the decade.