THE HI54 HOT 95, EH | <100 MONTHLY LISTENERS
I started playing around with the idea of sorting my Spotify ‘liked’ music by the artists’ monthly listener counts, and since I’ve accumulated + continue to accumulate a lot of ‘liked’ music, I thought it might be interesting to keep ongoing 95-track playlists for certain listener thresholds. This one is for those with LESS THAN 100 monthly listeners.
I think the thing I enjoy the most about having a “music blog”, the thing that keeps me punching in the clock, year after year, despite the lack of funds & fanfare that one would expect is needed to continue on with the full-time unregistered-non-profit work that is running a music blog, year after year, it’s gotta be the simple fact that music is just the best.
It feels good to listen to. It feels good to make. And, as the great Canadian rock band Sloan once said in their hit song If It Feels Good, Do It: “if it feels good, do it”. Well, the people have listened, because the people are most definitely DOING (aka: making & listening to) IT (aka: music) more than ever before. In fact, people are making so much music that it’s not even possible for anyone to listen to half of what is getting made, even if they spent every minute of every day trying.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
.
.
.
And it’s been in that never-ending search for new music that I started to get in the habit of better keeping track of all the music that my ears have already told me they like. Because, once you realize there’s no end to the “new” music train, you also start to realize just how many forgotten gems are already tucked away in the “liked” folder.
.
.
So, in the same spirit that led to my weekly-updated YOUR WEEKLY 9(to)5 EH playlist, I had the thought of filtering my massive “liked” collection on Spotify by the amount of monthly listeners each artist has (Spotify does not make this sorting easy, but, us music bloggers have a tendency to just put some tunes into our headphones and power through overwhelming tasks that literally nobody was asking us to do on a regular basis). I have not organized my entire “liked” library yet, but, I have organized enough of it that I could put together an ongoing ‘95 tracks from 95 different music projects’ playlist for the following monthly listening counts: Less Than 100, Less Than 1000, Less than 10k, Greater Than 10k, Greater Than 100k, and Greater Than 1 Million (links go to Spotify for now, but I will be creating similar blog posts as this one for each playlist over the next few weeks).
And then, going forward into whatever hellscape 2022 provides for us, I will continue to sort my “liked” music into these ‘listener buckets’ and continue to add new artists/tracks to these playlists (while removing songs from the bottom to keep everything at an even 95, because, despite the fact that I know we all tend to listen to playlists on shuffle, you can also listen to HI54 playlists from top-to-bottom like a big-ass giant mix cd because I am a sicko like that).
So, without any further ado-ing, here’s the LESS THAN 100 MONTHLY LISTENERS Spotify playlist…
… which you should probably go press the "like/follow" button for over on Spotify so you can continue to get future updates auto-magically appearing on your listening device throughout the year. Because there is guaranteed to be some headphones discoveries happening in here (unless you’re already one of the <100). And, as always, when you hear something you like, do the universe some good and support/check those artists out further (every little bit helps).
Speaking of which, here’s a few ‘available-on-Bandcamp’ tracks from the HI54 HOT 95, EH | <100 MONTHLY LISTENERS playlist:
LATEST SHUFFLE UP’D 8
Because the Spotifys of the world are great for discovering and keeping track and sharing music + they allow us to easily choose better soundtracks throughout the day than what we used to get handed down from FM radio stations before the internet arrived in everyone’s pocket, but the way creators are paid out with streaming is just not very good at all —especially in comparison to what others are making off providing access to the art of others.
Ideally, smart artist-minded technical people will start making some momentum into coming up with a better/fairer streaming model (here’s my contribution to the dialogue), but, for now, us appreciators of creativity/good things need to start doing a better job of being more mindful of making sure we’re continuing to show support to the creation of good things, in whatever ways we can. And Bandcamp is still one of the best online places going when it comes to supporting the makers of music through the forgotten art of giving the artist something in exchange for their music.
So, like I try to do with all my other mix cds, I will keep an ongoing Buy Music Club list archive going for all the ‘available on Bandcamp’ tracks that get added to this playlist on Spotify (at the time of me checking) — so go give that a gander whenever you find yourself wanting to reward your ears while also sending out support to those who help keep our lives nicely soundtracked:
.
.
.
.
.
.
And then I will continue to work on putting together blog posts / Buy Music Club lists for all my other new ‘listener count’ Spotify playlists + I will get things setup over on MOUN.TOWN/FM over the next few weeks… but, for now, I hope you enjoy the above modern mix cd & that you find yourself becoming someone’s new monthly listener — and if you’re an artist with LESS THAN 100 monthly listeners, I hope you see that you’re in some pretty good company (even if you’re not on of the 95 artists featured in the current playlist rotation).
And may we all keep doing “it” forever \m/
--
