How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

https://notes.xdavidhu.me/notes/how-i-archived-10-years-of-memories-using-spotify

by xdavidhu • 7 months ago

109 53 7 months ago

notes.xdavidhu.me

donkeyboy• 7 months ago

Cool idea. One thing the author might like: if you sign up to lastfm, it tracks all of your music plays. So you can go through the data and see what you were listening yo each month/week

vjerancrnjak• 7 months ago

Librefm or listenbrainz as well

caminanteblanco2• 7 months ago

Listenbrainz has a really intuitive and permissive api! I was just building my own tracker app with it yesterday: https://github.com/caminante-blanco/bowie-tracker

xdavidhu4• 7 months ago

Last.fm is great! I do like the breakdowns you can do there, especially the query for the top songs/artists of the last 30 days, year & all time.

It's not as seamless to jump in and listen to stuff on lastfm though.

pcchristie• 7 months ago

It's annoying they don't allow migrating in a data dump from Spotify (they do, but everything is tagged as listened to on the day of import...). My Spotify account is 10 years old but I only discovered Last.fm ~ 6 months ago.

treesknees• 7 months ago

I recently stumbled across my lastfm login from late middle and early high school days. Talk about a blast from the past. This is a good idea, to keep the history going.

g0wda• 7 months ago

Nice! I have my lastfm when I need a throw back. They still allow yearly views

nonoesp• 7 months ago

I create a playlist for each month (e.g., 2026.01) inside of a folder of the corresponding year (e.g., 2026) and add new tracks there (instead of using Spotify likes). This allows me to jump back to a specific year/month. You can also hit play on the folder to play all songs from a specific year.

I used to have a single Inbox playlist to save music and keep the date when I saved each song.

afandian• 7 months ago

The words 'archive' and 'Spotify' do not go together naturally! (Ditto any subscription service).

From the title I was expecting something like "how I archived my Spotify memories in a plain text file".

walthamstow• 7 months ago

It's still valuable stuff. What I wouldn't give for a text file containing a list of everything I had on my iPod classic circa 2006.

stared• 7 months ago

Fortunately, there is a way to extract song lists - via API, official export, or even MCP. https://github.com/marcelmarais/spotify-mcp-server

I recommend doing so, even as a backup.

xdavidhu4• 7 months ago

Oh this is great, i might run this over my backups to retain the artists/titles as well.

xdavidhu4• 7 months ago

It is relatively easy (currently) to take a playlist and back it up as a plain text file.

CTRL+A, CTRL+C from web or desktop puts a newline separated plain text list of songs on your clipboard.

Main risk is that the list is in the format of "https[:]//open[.]spotify[.]com/track/[song-id]", so Spotify may break the lookup of these IDs in the future.

embedding-shape• 7 months ago

so Spotify may break the lookup of these IDs in the future.

Luckily, Spotify seems pretty good at backwards compatibility. `spotify:user:$username` still seems to work in the search-bar, must have worked for almost 20 years now, and given that artists themselves use those track URIs and IDs, I'm sure Spotify will be even more careful with those than search query syntax.

fragmede• 7 months ago

Anna's Archive would disagree.

caminanteblanco2• 7 months ago

Of potential interest, listenbrainz supports uploading your Spotify backup raw, and will keep it all in a easily parseseable, query-able backup. Combine that with a good scrobbler, and you never need to be at Spotify's whims again

phatfish• 7 months ago

I enjoy looking back at what I had been listening to in previous years as well. But playlists in Spotify have a "Date added" column, so you get a chronology from there. I guess splitting them out into years means you can shuffle a single year. Apart from that it seems to just complicate the process.

My "Starred" playlist has the first song added in 2010. When Spotify decided "Like" was now going to be how to favourite songs i just ignored it and kept using the Starred playlist.

I do wish the play history and play counts were kept longer. Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime play counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.

xdavidhu4• 7 months ago

Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime play counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.

I wonder if they provide this data if you do a "download your information" request. I remember some discussion about how much info that archive had:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681289

arccy2• 7 months ago

https://listenbrainz.org/ or last.fm are better if you actually want to track these things.

deguzman-cloud• 7 months ago

i created a very rough app that creates monthly/weekly playlists based on your listening history for this exact purpose! getting a commercial spotify api key is impossible so i never fully finished it.

https://github.com/matt-dz/hathr-backend

arccy2• 7 months ago

i tried something similar too... but last year they started returning less data in the api, especially around analysis which was really annoying

sylens• 7 months ago

I do something very similar but with seasons - I have a "Winter 2024", "Spring 2025", etc. playlist and its really nice to go back and listen to what I was into at the time

analogpixel• 7 months ago

Has anyone ever tried something like this with notes (obsidian/notion). Wondering what it would look like to restart your notes each year with the ability to look back at previous years.

_ink_• 7 months ago

I have Aphantasia and SDAM, so how I experience memories is vastly different from most others. But even for me music helps me to recall memories otherwise lost. I also discovered this trick and use it to get reminded of certain memories or people.

aed• 7 months ago

This is cool! I love stuff like this, it's fun to use stuff like this to see the passage of time a little more clearly.

Similar ideas:

I've been keeping notes in Roam Research for nearly 6 years now. Whenever I'm writing notes for that day, I'll go back to the same day 5, 4, 3, etc. years ago and see what I was working on.

I also recently went through the trouble of getting all of my running data into a spreadsheet. I started in 2018 and have gone through three different apps. Currently on my to-vibe-code-list: a little app that takes all of my runs from Apple Health and makes a neat dashboard showing pace, miles, routes, etc. over the years.

largbae• 7 months ago

I don't do the year thing, I just keep a single, ever-growing playlist of any song that triggers a memory. I use it as the default while driving, and take "phoned in" requests like a radio station to allow my kids to override. Some days they do that a lot, other days they ask questions about what memory each song means to me. I love it either way.

JoshGlazebrook2• 7 months ago

I do something slightly different. I create a new playlist every month, sometimes songs carry over from the previous month, sometimes not. New songs come in, old songs go out. I can go back to any month since late 2011 and see what I was listening to at the time.

purplezooey• 7 months ago

Really like this idea. The archive is automatic! Do you have to organize into folders etc. or just one big list.

JoshGlazebrook2• 7 months ago

You _can_ organize them into folders, but I haven't bothered yet. Everything is just name Nov 25, etc.

vvoyer• 7 months ago

I do the same, I named them “SelecTunes YYMM” and been doing it since 2018

operatorius• 7 months ago

tangentially related

I've decided to part ways with my physical record collection. Before putting everything up for sale on discogs I decided I will listen and sit through every record I have. Going through each brought back many memories of the times I listened to the record the most. It was enough just to take it into my hands, take it out, look at the cover.

I rarely feel anything like that when I play music via digital means. As if memories _stick_ better on physical mediums.

pinkmuffinere• 7 months ago

To maintain the integrity & not override the memories associated with specific songs, I rarely listen to or re-save songs from the past years. Sometimes I give myself exceptions, though, especially with remixes. ;)

I listen to music as a form of enjoyment, and I can't imagine restricting the music I listen to arbitrarily, for seemingly no gain. To each their own, but it's hard for me to understand how this is making the author happy.

ghostpepper• 7 months ago

I can sort of understand this. There are certain songs, eg. a song from my wedding, that hit like a (good) ton of bricks every time I hear them, but I wouldn't want to listen to it every day because I feel like I would have more and more banal experiences cumulatively associating with the song until the wedding feeling becomes just one of many and starts to lose its association.

rurban• 7 months ago

I do more, with real physical offline archives for every year, without Spotify premium. Since 2008 or so. I download all of my Best of YEAR songs with one of the Spotify archivers into a playlist (there's one online service also), copy those list to my phone and got the archive. Holes are filled with YouTube rippers.

I've worked as music editor of a local private radio and there I collected tons of songs after getting rid of my huge and expensive LP archive. Even KTRU allows now digital, they were LP-only for decades.

namenumber• 7 months ago

Seems I'm not the only person doing something like this then.

Personally i started a "To Remember" playlist in about 2009 and have been adding every single track I've liked enough since to said playlist. By now its 4127 songs!

With the timestamps its a great way to relive past periods of my life, and also I can put it on shuffle and get the soundtrack of my life. Been a great boon in my life for a very long time.

Also, to keep track of albums I've listened to i keep a "Where I've Been" list where the first track of every album I've listened to in its entirety goes. Its a small way to fight the ephemerality of listening to an album in the digital environment.

I actually i scrolled through the entire list just two days ago and bathed in the memories, was fun to see all the places I had been and forgotten about.

I really do miss having a rack of CDs to let my eyes float over for the memories, and the digital "equivalent" is a brittle substitute, but it has enhanced my life in many ways so I've come to accept the tradeoff.

jphorism• 7 months ago

Cool to see that it pays off to have split things up by season!

having worked on the AI Playlist feature at Spotify (which is agentic) -- one thing you can try to prompt is "give me songs that sound <vibe> from my <liked songs | playlist called "X">.

An extension of this is "give me a sequence of N tracks from each of <list of playlist names for each past year> that all evoke <vibe / memory / activity>". Could be a fun prompt to play with

sbarre4• 7 months ago

I have a similar system but it's a bit more ongoing.

Since March 2018 I've created a new playlist "[Month Year]" on the 1st of every month, and every time I listen to a song I enjoy (whether it's new or old or whatever - no rules) I add it to that month's playlist. In fact the only "rule" is to never remove a song once it's added.

Then at the end of the year I make 24-song a "Best of [Year]" playlist where I go back and pick 2 songs from each month, in no particular order, to sum up my year in music.

This tends to reflect my music enjoyment (vs listening) much better than Spotify Wrapped, which over-indexes on music I listen to at work or in the car (when I'm often not really paying attention).

I just crossed 100 months back in November or December, and I have to say it's pretty fun to go back and check out a given month/year in the past (much like the author) and revisit what I was into at the time.

wwfn• 7 months ago

do you share your top-24 anywhere?

xattt• 7 months ago

I would presume it’s entirely subjective and the significance of each song is encoded in the context of life at that particular time.

There were a couple of months this year where my kids wanted to listen to Sesame Street “Letter L” and “The Word is No” while commuting. Hearing those songs on a playlist would remind me whatever was happening, but would have absolutely no significance to you.

sbarre4• 7 months ago

All my monthly playlists and the yearly best-of are public on my profile:

https://open.spotify.com/user/sebastienbarre

FinnKuhn• 7 months ago

I have one playlist I add songs to I listen to on repeat. Going back through it, it really shows what I was mostly listening to at what time.

sbarre4• 7 months ago

Yeah Spotify's "Liked Songs" is that for me.. I just throw stuff in there that I want to keep track of.. I have 3,671 songs in there now so it's not super curated..

nadis• 7 months ago

This is a really simple yet clever system and I may have to give it a try! I've created vibes-based playlists at points-in-time but otherwise just dump everything to my "like" list on Spotify which is fairly poorly organized after so many years.

nipperkinfeet• 7 months ago

For me, Spotify is only for discovery. I've been collecting MP3s of my favorite tracks for over 25 years, long before streaming became popular, and I still do it today. I organize my collection by the year each track was created using a folder structure on my hard drive instead of playlists, and it's all stored locally. I could go even further with this amazing software called MP3tag. Audio Dedupe is great at finding duplicates.

protocolture• 7 months ago

Thats not bad at all.

Sadly, Spotify has decided to remove the subscription tier I was using. I havent really engaged with it since. Just moved on to Audible lmao.

If I ever care enough to try spotify again, I will do just this.

zdc1• 7 months ago

I have a lightweight version of this. I have one playlist called "Story of my life". If I have a song that is consistently stuck in my head, my go-to to kick off a listening session, or otherwise very notable, I will add it to the playlist. This results in a playlist where I have a song for each "season" of my life. I can pick out a song and will often remember what was happening in my life when I added it, and what their general feeling of the time was.

This is all separate from my ever-changing genre-specific playlists that I like to maintain and listen to.

milchek• 7 months ago

I had the same idea a little while back and ended up creating playlists by year going back to the mid 90s. It’s a great way to deep dive and create “keys” to memories.

However, there is one major flaw. I’ve found that treating music as a key to unlock memory from certain periods means I tend not to revisit that same music casually because I know that each time I listen to music it gets re-encoded to current events in time.

I can’t remember where I read that (some study from ages ago) but basically if there was a song you listened to a lot as a kid and then you hear it again it will remind you of that time in your childhood, but if you keep listening to it then the song also gets attached to current memory and in 20 years when you hear it again you will have a mix of childhood and adult memories flooding back - or some diluted memory.

It might not work that way for everyone but I’ve found it to be true at least in my own personal experience.

125123wqw12122• 7 months ago

That's interesting, I have never had this re-encode thing. No matter what, "Backstreet Boys" will always stick with my school student period.

I think the main reason is it's really hard to re-listen to a piece to the same intensity as when you first heard it. I used to put Backstreet Boys on repeat for a whole week at times, and also sat through some of their sub-par pieces. Now I only listen to their best-of-playlist, in about an hour, maybe once a year.

125123wqw12122• 7 months ago

A downside to this is it's impossible to enjoy a song if it's from a not so fun period of your life.

freetonik• 7 months ago

Hey OP, I hope you're doing better (I just read some of your earlier posts in the blog).

kartoshechka• 7 months ago

I think part of the experience is actually remembering by feeling what time does this song come from, and making it available in one click kinda kills the magic

bill_duckduckgo• 7 months ago

I have been doing something similar on Spotify. I've been curating a playlist called "Jam of the Week" and each Thursday, I look back on the week and pick one song that best represents that week. What did I listen to on repeat? What song just dropped that I loved? What song did a friend share with me that I loved? Pick one and add it.

I've been running it for 460 weeks now - almost 9 years of memories. Not every song means something important, but a lot of them bring me right back to the time when I added it and makes me smile. I put the playlist on shuffle when I don't know what to listen to.

How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

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