I’m not a music editor. I’m a fan of dumping the entire catalog for an artist or group into a playlist and calling it complete. This sometimes leads to disappointment with my playlists because of this lack of curation.

I’ve been using Spotify recently, but 8tracks has been my go to for curated music in the past. 8tracks can be a little hit or miss because the songs are taken from SoundCloud (another place to stream music) and sometimes the songs are tagged incorrectly causing the wrong song to play. Also frequent repeats in a collection of playlists and super short playlists can be an issue. But overall I like how the playlists are curated and moreover I like that collections of playlists can be compiled.

Other sites to stream music include Pandora, Google Play Music, and YouTube.

For writing I typically choose wordless music because I can’t concentrate on words if I’m hearing words. There is music with words that I can tune out, but that feels the the opposite of the point of listening to music. If music doesn’t enhance the environment, why play it?

For Camp NaNoWriMo this year I created one big playlist with 39.25 hours of music. This turned out to be an awful idea because I wouldn’t remember what music I’d already listened to and it never really fit whatever mood I was in.

This time I’m creating smaller playlists of music that are approximately the amount of time I’ll need to write everyday (when not writing on my phone). I’m also mixing songs I know with songs I don’t so I’m more likely to be hooked into the playlist.

How do you curate your playlists?