Playlist-ening

I know this is a pretty old thing, and that most people have been doing this for years, but I made myself a playlist. My kids each have a playlist of favorite songs that they listen to, but recently, we changed our music service, and they had to go through and remake their playlists on that one. I decided I would make myself one too. My daughter insisted that I get cover art for it, so she found a cool picture on Pinterest, and sent it to me. Behold:

Rock and roll, baby! (Although my playlist has all kinds of things from Big Band Swing to 80s Pop and so on).

I'm an old Gen-Xer, so I listened to cassette tapes growing up, then finally graduated to CDs about the time I was graduating high school and heading to college. I like to listen to albums. Kids today seem to listen to songs. They hear a song they like and add it to their playlist, but they don't do what I do. They don't hear a song they like, and then go to the album and see if the band (or artists, I suppose, since bands barely exist anymore) has other songs that they also like.

That's how I've always listened to music. I get into bands, and do a full deep dive into their catalog. Sometimes, their catalog isn't very deep, and taking the dive doesn't get me anything. Instead, I find that there's just the one song I like. Other times, I find a new band that joins the list of my favorites, and I listen to their music for months on end.

Now, however, I'm trying out this playlist thing. I made something called My Big Playlist (no pun intended), which has all my favorite songs on all of my albums that I've accumulated over my unbelievably long life...seriously, how does someone even get as old as me and still manage to be alive?...and I just tell my phone or Alexa to shuffle it for me whenever I want to listen to music.

I've actually really enjoyed it. It's really varied, so any kind of song might pop up, but each and every one of them is good. There's not a one that I dislike. I find that I'm listening to music more recently than I have in a long time. I wonder, however, if it will prevent me from finding out about new bands and stuff in the future. That would be a bummer if that happened. 

I don't really know how to discover new artists these days. The radio plays the same old stuff on the stations that play my kind of music. The top-40 stations play unlistenable dog vomit. I suppose there's probably playlists that are curated by the music services that play new stuff from my kind of music. I guess I'll have to make sure to do that sometimes. I don't know. It's a brave new world for me.

I have a lot of work to do on my playlist still. I've only made it through the Hs so far (although there's other stuff in there, because I was getting stuff at random at first). The playlist, however, is already 945 songs totaling 63 hours and 54 minutes. If I hit play, and let it go, it would be almost three days before the same song would come up again, and I'm not even halfway through the alphabet.