The Deep Cuts smart play list

For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been listening to less new music. Oh, I still listen to a lot of it, but I’m also rediscovering a lot of stuff in the dusty back shelves of my iTunes library.

The way I do it is through a smart play list, which is a playlist that iTunes will auto-populate based on criteria you set. I realized a while back that, although I was succeeding in my goal of not just listening to the same stuff that was in my CD collection when I graduated college (and succeeding albums from only those artists, forever and ever, amen), I was turning into some sort of NME/Pitchfork douchebag who could only listen to artists that were five to 10 minutes from being discovered, and nothing else. (Which is ironic, since I think that the staff of Pitchfork should be dealt with harshly, using their titular farming implement.)

So back into the library my iPhone now goes, with a Deep Cuts play list, which I named after a segment that one of the Washington, DC classic rock stations (does anyone really have the ability to distinguish one classic rock station from another?) that basically consisted of “hey, it turns out there’s more than four songs that we can play, although we promise to still play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every hour.” They would go “deep” into an album and play something other than the main hit said album was best known for.

My version of this idea is an iTunes smart play list with the following criteria:

Genre is Rock
Play Count is 0 (I reset the play counts of all the songs in my iTunes once a year, just so I can track the year’s top 100)
Last Played is not in the last 12 months
Limit to 50 items selected by random

Then there’s several bands that I exclude — I have Billy Joel’s 1970s albums in my iTunes collection, but I don’t want him popping up in the middle of a bunch of modern rock tunes.

So every time I listen to the play list (which I have set to random play on my iPhone), I get a whole lot of surprises. Often it’s songs that have made my previous top 100 lists — the current Deep Cuts line-up includes “Swimming Pool” by the Submarines, “I Turn My Camera On” by Spoon and “One of these Days” by Kraak & Smaak — but it’s also a lot of stuff that I’ve rarely, if ever, listened to since getting my first iPod for Christmas in 2004 (including, at the moment, “Jesus Wrote a Blank Check” by Cake, “Since I Don’t Have You” by Guns N’ Roses and a remix of “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood).

The nice thing about this sort of play list is that it should work for anyone, whatever their taste. (If you don’t like rock music, just change the genre to one you prefer.)

1 Comment »

1. And I haven’t given up on my new music ways. My Recently Added smart play list currently includes the following four tracks:

   * We Are the Men You’ll Grow to Love Soon by Let’s Wrestle
   * The High Road by Broken Bells
   * Heart of Steel by Galactic
   * Seven Nation Army by Nostalgia 77

   All good songs. The White Stripes cover, in particular, is awesome.

   Comment by Beau — March 9, 2010 @ 22:13

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>