Finding New Releases using the app Albums

I recently had a side conversation with a future (soon!) Crucial Tracks interview guest about tracking new releases and managing your music library, as I've come to the realization that I may have too much music in my Apple Music library. (Currently 4,692 albums, which is over 50,000 songs.) It makes it challenging to find something to listen to that hasn't recently been added to my library.

Albums, the music app I use everywhere (including CarPlay) has a decent mechanism for building out smaller lists ("collections") and even random albums to help with that problem, but with over 4,600 albums, I've been noticing more and more suggestions that are things I will probably never listen to again.

So, with that said I set out to improve my process for adding music as well as starting to weed through my collection...without having to declare musical bankruptcy and delete it all, like I did probably 5 years ago.

For this post, I'll be focusing on finding and adding new music... I'm still working through my "clean out the library" workflow, so that will be coming in the future.

Adding new releases

One of the coolest features of Albums is the Release Feed and Upcoming Releases view that shows you when albums are announced and added to Apple Music (Release Feed) and a view of the coming weeks (Upcoming Releases)...

These feeds are built by the app using the artists in your library, as well as any labels you may subscribe to in the app. You can exclude certain artists, as well as filter the views to only show full albums (and hide singles, which I recommend!)

From these two views you can check out and add any albums to your library, so they automatically show up on release day OR (and this is what I do...) add a tag to the album, which you can use to build a collection. My tag is called "Check Out Later" and I use that to collect albums I want to listen to each week and consider for Crucial Tracks and, ultimately, my library.

The Check Out Later collection uses that tag as a base, then filters to only show albums that have been released and I haven't listened to completely. From that collection view I can see what albums are left to check out and once I listen, I can either:

• remove the tag and the album disappears from the app
• add to my library
• tag with "Pretty Good" which is my signal to include in Crucial Tracks, or "Best of"... which means it's under consideration for my end of year list as well

Additionally I have another collection called "Add to Library?" which collects any "Check Out Later" albums that have been listened to at least once and have yet to be decided on...

This workflow helps me find most of the new albums I consider each week, but not all! For that I browse Apple Music by genre (currently: Alternative, Indie, Hip Hop, Punk, and occasionally Rock and R&B) to check out the New Releases section in each of those areas. From there, I use a shortcut I created with the iOS Shortcuts app to add the album to my "Check Out Later" tag in Albums. No more adding albums and having to remember to go back and delete the stuff I don't want to keep!

Beyond these features, Albums has a LOT to offer music fans, including:

• A focus on albums! (as you can tell by the name)
• Last.fm integration, which gets me my year end Wrapped report
• If you don't use Last.fm, there is a built-in listening report which is pretty solid
• Collections in general can be used for literally anything (releases by year, decade, etc.) – basically anything you can dream up and build filters for...
• Insights, which are basically built-in collections to surface albums... like Favorites, Old Favorites (albums you used to listen to a lot, but not recently), Today in History (like an album released 25 years ago today), album lists based on when you were in high school, various ages, etc.
• An album view that combines basic liner notes, historical listening stats, and notes you've added over time
• A pretty good CarPlay app
• The developer is very responsive and always looking to improve the app

It's probably my most used app on iPhone, so I highly recommend checking it out.

Alright... I can hear you calling me a nerd all the way from over here... 😄 but seriously, I hope someone finds all of this useful!

As I mentioned above, I'll follow up in a few weeks with how I'm handling the old stuff in my library. Stay tuned.