After years of not doing so, late last year I returned to making seasonal playlists. I’ve felt compelled to return to doing so after reading Frank Chimero’s blog post about creating monthly playlists, however that had always felt like too short of a life cycle for the songs I listen to. Instead, I’ve noticed that my listening habits are often reflective of the seasons.
Over the course few months my song rotation slowly grows before transitioning into the next phase. Chappell Ellison also tweeted recently about organizing her music according to seasons. She notes it as a seasonal diary which feels extremely fitting. My 2013 summer playlist, for example, serves as a wonderful reminder that I was listening to a lot of Lorde, Local Natives, and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.
Now as summer tip-toes its way in, I find myself slowly moving on from my Spring playlist so it only feels appropriate to now share it with you.
I also started a playlist of artists I come across that you may not have heard of yet. This is similar to Matt Yow’s Not Pop playlist where he was sharing artists with under 1,000 monthly listeners. While many of the artists on this playlist have less than 1,000 monthly listeners the playlist doesn’t conform to any hard rules. For example, a few of the artists have over 30,000 monthly listeners.
I’ll be continuing to update this over time so give it a follow if you’re interested in discovering some new music. I intend on keeping it fairly genre agnostic (although it certainly shows a bias towards hip hop at the moment). If you do follow the playlist, I’d recommend organizing it by recently added songs first.