Vibe, and purpose. I have a gym playlist full of metal, 90’s rap, and some bebop. I also have a playlist for rock, another for metal, a classical playlist, a medievalish playlist (think Danheim, Heilung, The HU, etc), and another for just jazz. I also have playlists for the decades spanning from the 50’s to the 90’s. Ended up doing playlists for whenever I’m feeling really good, and for whenever I’m down in the dumps, just in case.

The decades playlists really help with being handed the aux. Most people don’t do well going from Toto or Green Day to Messhuggah and Opeth, so, dividing a genre by decade is good. I know my grandma will not vibe with Polyphia, so I play her some latin music, classical, or jazz, and she’s fine with it.

This leads to many, many playlists, and there’s a lot of overlap, but I don’t really mind as long as I can make sure I have a playlist for any mood I might find myself in.

I make playlists by what songs i was feeling each year. This way I can go back and reminisce and reflect on what I was going through.

Some lists repeat the same songs but are generally uniquely. For example, Radiohead’s Creep is on many of my lists.

I download my music and order it by Artists>Album>Song, basically without exception. Occasionally annoying when a song has multiple authors, because people don’t always write the metadata the same way and it fucks with my music player, but that’s besides the point.

When I make playlist, I just take a whole album, filter out a few songs if need be and shove it into a given playlist, sometimes I can do that with an entire artist, but it’s not always that easy.

Another issue with my approach is the odd single song from a random artist that’s really good, but everything else they ever made makes me fall asleep, that’s a really annoying one… Might start making my own fake albums.

Most of my playlists are actually by artist. Silly as it sounds I will put whole albums by the same artist in release order into new playlists by their name so I can just ask Siri to “play playlist <artist name>” and listen to the albums in order as I tend to listen to whole albums. The other playlists are like my year in review playlists that were automatically generated and some curated playlists like “weekly new music” and “top alternative” type stuff that I didn’t create but added and listen to often.

If I want a mix of stuff I like, I don’t turn to playlists anymore and instead I just ask Siri to “play some music” because the “just for you” radio is so good that I get tons of hits and top songs for my own taste as well as discover tons of new to me music that gets sprinkled in that the algorithm finds for me.

If the “play some music” stuff ends up not what I want to hear right then, I’ll just make the same request again or “play some different music” and it will switch to other music it knows I like. This is helpful when one request sends me down electronic path when I want more alt rock, etc.

I have a few playlists that are accompaniments to particular stories/pieces of media. Basically playlists with a narrative they follow. Those are somewhat easy to make, because then I just add any song that makes me think of the story and then I sort the songs into chronological order of which part of the narrative I feel they apply to. Then I have a playlist for political music, so I guess that’d be a playlist by topic.

Normally when I listen to music on Spotify I just shuffle my liked songs though.

I’ve just got a general playlist, sad stuff, gym, and ERM. 95% of stuff gets dumped straight into the general one

I never felt the need of creating playlists. I just have one playlist with all my songs. My local music player allows to switch between platlists and albums so if i want to listen to a whole album, i don’t have the remember the last position in my big playlist

I have different folders for different genres, then subdivided in folders for year of release.

I spent way too much time organizing this way back so I stick with it. Problems with this are that genes can overlap (could be fixed with symlinks?) and the year is something you often have to look up (id3 often shows year of the album which is not always the year it came out).

(This is for native storage but I’m bored and want to contribute)

I do the genre thing. I’ll simplify them first. Like I have-
1 big one for Ska.
1 for first wave ska.
1 for second wave.
1 for 3rd.
No reggae, thats 1st wave. Same with rocksteady, dub, dance hall, etc.
Metal is all metal. No crossover or Nü.
I do separate Punk and Skate Punk though, the latter being the old Thrasher Mag Skate Rock tapes.
Rock is a mess but everything from AcDc to Pusa. Hip-hop is anything that even could be considered rap.
EDM is the same.

Just super broad strokes. Then a playlist is either a genre or two or the entire catalog of a few bands. Occasionally, if I get super motivated, I’ll do a playlist with albums, but rarely any more specific than that unless I need something particular- Like one for running, or a game session.

I don’t. I only have a Liked Songs on Spotify. I like the randomness of it all.

Most of the music I listen to is OST, so I have a ton of those playlists where it’s the full soundtrack, whether or not I like the specific song.

And then I have two other dedicated playlists. One is called “Eclectic series,” which is composed of literally anything I find in the wild and like, and therefore is my largest playlist (besides one huge playlist surrounding a certain webcomic). The other is similar in inspiration, but is music that I liked and want to keep for reference but probably wouldn’t want showing up in my shuffle queue. This tends to be any lyrical music that I find and like.

And then I just throw it all except the lyrical music into a third-party music shuffler.

The trade-offs with this model are that it takes a lot less effort to build up your playlist because everything goes into basically one place, and so your library and exposure grow fairly quickly, but at the cost of less control at playback, since everything is either grouped canonically or unsorted altogether.

Works for me since I don’t listen to much lyrical music and can get into the dynamic flow and artistry of the music without the distraction of words, but it’s probably not great for people who enjoy lyrics and poetry.

Edit: I should mention that I’ve been working on-and-off on a tool that automates and facilitates playback for god-lists and ant-lists alike for a while now. It’s been a minute since I’ve touched it, but maybe I should get back to it.

Now that I think about it, using a website that could gain access to your playlist and move around the different songs to new playlists (based on genre/mood/etc) would be a godsend…

Outside of sorting them by artist, album and maybe something else depending on what it is, I kind of don’t. If there is a song that I like, I’ll download it and add it to the folder where I keep all of my music. Yes, this does cause a playlist that is massive and kind of sporadic but I already listen to artists like A-one and Sound Holic which already have at least some level of variety to the style of music they make.

Only 3…

• Albums -> Full albums
• Recopilations -> Compilation albums
• Random -> Songs

Genre --> Author --> Album --> Song.