It’s not a secret that I’m a bit of a Christmas music nut. I may or may not have almost 500 songs in my collection … That said, not every song in my collection is created equal. With my non-Christmas music I am much more of a song person than an album person. I will happily delete non-Christmas songs that I don’t like from albums making them incomplete. With Christmas music, however, I tend to have more sentimental feelings towards entire albums than individual songs. (“I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” is an exception.) I also have a compulsion that all of my Christmas music get listened to in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The problem with shuffle, though, is that albums/songs you don’t particularly like tend to pop up too much. This all results in the need for a different kind of music organization. I’m trying something new this year. First I went through and rated all of my albums – 5 stars for albums I LOVE (e.g. Christmas Portrait by the Carpenters), 4 stars for albums I like (e.g. A Very Special Christmas) and 3 stars for albums I don’t want to hear a bunch but still want in my collection (e.g. all of the Kenny G albums). Then, using the same technique I use the rest of the year, I created smart albums that includes: 5 star song that hasn’t been played in 3 days, 4 star songs that haven’t been played in 5 days and 3 star songs that haven’t been played in a week. So far it’s working for me, although I’m considering extending the 3 stars to 10 days. We’ll see.
P.S. Although I’m sure that the above graphic is based on actual data, I would have to add “All I Want for Christmas Is You” originally by Mariah Carey. It’s from the 90s and – for me at least – gets heavy rotation. In fact, I may or may not have 3 different versions of it … Otherwise all those songs are definitely classics in my book and I definitely have several versions of each.
