January 4, 2026
Smells like teen playlist drama
How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify
He time-traveled with playlists; commenters yell: use Last.fm
TLDR: An editor built yearly Spotify playlists to relive emotions by date. Commenters applauded the idea but clapped back that real archives live on Last.fm and ListenBrainz, not a subscription app—sparking a lively debate over owning your memories versus trusting Spotify.
A music lover shared a New Year’s ritual: every January 1, he copies all his Spotify “liked songs” into a new year-labeled playlist, wipes the likes clean, and starts fresh—creating a time machine of feelings that lets him relive, say, “fall 2016” by scrolling a quarter down the list. He even backs it up in Google Drive and avoids replaying old favorites to protect the vibes. The community? Whew. It’s chaos and comedy. The Last.fm crowd swooped in like superheroes, shouting that Last.fm “scrobbles” (tracks) every play and offers monthly and yearly throwbacks. Others flexed their own systems, like folders of monthly playlists (think “2026.01”) for laser-precise nostalgia, plus an Inbox playlist for date stamps. Then came the drama: “Archive” and “Spotify” don’t mix, roared skeptics, warning that subscription platforms aren’t real memory banks. Cue the data-nerds plugging ListenBrainz, a free project that can ingest your Spotify backup and store it in a queryable, human-readable form—aka your memories, not Spotify’s. Some cheered the author’s vibe-first approach, others rolled their eyes at platform lock-in. Bottom line: it’s a wholesome idea turned tech loyalty war, with scrobblers vs streamers, spreadsheets vs feelings, and everyone fighting for the soundtrack of their past. Check the playlists here: author’s archive
Key Points
- •The author creates a new Spotify playlist every January 1 titled with the previous year.
- •All ‘Liked Songs’ are copied into the new playlist to preserve chronological order, then ‘Liked Songs’ are cleared.
- •An external backup of the playlist is saved by pasting its contents into a Google Drive sheet.
- •The preserved order enables recalling specific periods within a year by navigating to the corresponding position in the playlist.
- •Listening from the top of ‘Liked Songs’ without shuffle and saving ambient tracks creates strong time-linked memory anchors; past-year songs are rarely revisited.