Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from Crucial Tracks.

With 2023 in the books, I’ve got some updates to my end of year post.

First up is my 2023 song-a-day playlist… now with 365 songs!

Since it’s January 1, it’s also a perfect time to take up this project in your own life. This will be my 3rd year doing this (see 2022 and the new 2024 version) and it’s one of my favorite habits. Each day (or so) I add a meaningful song to the playlist. It could be: a song I listened to during the day, a song from a new band I “discovered” that day, a song to represent something that i did (like going to a concert), or a song that was meaningful for other reasons (like my mom’s favorite song; she passed away in 2022.) I like to think of it as a musical journal.

We then listen to these playlists on long car trips and the memories come flooding back when each song plays. It’s pretty awesome. And it 100% fits with the spirit of Crucial Tracks.

If you end up taking on the project, send us a link so we can follow along! (or comment below so others can follow along too…)

Secondly, I mentioned Last.fm in my year-end post and today they released the Year in Music reports for subscribers. Here’s mine. And some highlights:

• 7565 songs listened (+27% over 2022) and 17 days, 18 hours of music!
• 645 artists
• 825 albums
• 4497 unique tracks
• 58% mainstream score (balanced, but leaning more obscure)

Such a fun report. I highly recommend using Last.fm (and if you already do, please give me a follow!) See my year end post for more details on the service and how to use it.

Finally, one important January announcement from the Crucial Tracks team:

A good friend of ours very generously donated some money to help kick off this project and we’re going to use a chunk of that to help spread the word and encourage people to sign up for the newsletter.

Chris and I have decided to hold a record giveaway at the end of the month. We’re going to curate a selection of records from our origin stories and “best of 2023” selections to give away to email subscribers at the end of the month. We already hit up two record stores this past weekend and had a blast picking out a handful of records to start the pile… we’ll tease more on what those are as the month goes on!

Since we have a new permanent home here on our own domain, we’re going to move to a biweekly newsletter schedule and post more frequently here on the site. The newsletters will feature the Crucial Tracks interviews, as well as a selection of other posts that we added during the two weeks. The email list will be the best way to not miss anything important and follow along at your own pace. You are more than welcome to visit the site regularly or subscribe via RSS if you want a closer to real-time view of the project.

Stay tuned for more on the giveaway. You won’t be disappointed. In the mean time, make sure you have subscribed!

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