My iTunes Library and I

I have a complicated relationship with Apple. They have well and truly infiltrated my life — I have the phone, tablet, laptop and desktop computer — although all of these were passed down from my dad (a truely off-the-deep-end Apple addict if ever there was one), so I can plead away some of my culpability. 

Yes, they are amazing products on their own terms, and they help me organise my life to an extent that it might seem from the outside as if my life is actually organised. But this reliance also makes me uncomfortable. I am distrusting of the motives of technology companies in general, so any reliance on technology makes me uncomfortable, not least a company who’s bite-out-of-the-apple-of-knowledge logo has a slightly satanic sniff to it.

In short, if Apple disappeared tomorrow, I would be a broken man. Not because I couldn’t buy a new phone, or tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, because obviously I could, and everything that is on them is backed up in one cloud device or another (if we lost the cloud too, then I am well and truly done). But because the entire method I have developed for listening to music, carefully constructed and evolved over approximately the last ten years since I became hooked on this particular forbidden fruit, lies in my iTunes library (and yes, I know it’s called Apple Music now, and there technically is no iTunes — it is still too raw). 

My library is a source of immense pride, satisfaction and arguably wasted. A brief (ish) summary would be this.

I download a new album, and almost immediately (often before I have listened to it) I assign it a Genre that fits within my pre-established nomenclature. Genres are the broadest framework I have for categorising my music into Smart Playlists, from which most of my non-album listening occurs. There are the standard and self explanatory ones: Rock, Pop (and combined: Pop-Rock), Folk, Classical, Hip-Hop, Punk, Metal. A few niche genres: Ambient, Drone, Post-Rock. Anything from before the 80s (mostly the Beatles) gets the rather generalised ‘Rock n Roll’. 

These are level 1 categories. (A special level 1 that will get more attention in the future is ‘Emo’, which mainly captures all the angsty punk and hardcore inspired music from my late teens and early 20s). 

Then there are level 2 categories. These occasionally stand on their own, but are mainly used as modifiers for level 1 categories. The main ones are Electro (as the name suggests, anything that is primarily based around electronic instruments or sounds), Indie (anything that is more alternative leaning), and Heavy (anything that, musically or thematically, has bit more of an edge to it). 

These level two categories combine with level 1. Hence we have hybrid genres such as Indie Rock (e.g. Bloc Party, Radiohead) as opposed to Heavy Rock (e.g. System of a Down, Nine Inch Nails) or plain Rock (Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers).

The framework goes a bit deeper when it comes to themes. This is an additional level of categorisation that relates to particular moods or situations. Smart Playlists for moods, for example, include Chill, Deep, Melancholy, Dark. For situations, there is Move (for exercise), Yoga, Meditate, Sleep. 

Grouping whole albums into either genres or themes is pretty straightforward, achieved simply by changing the Genre (for genre) or Grouping (for theme) within the info tab of the album. It's then straightforward to create a Smart Playlist that picks up all songs with that key word. 

However not all albums fit so neatly of course. The last thing I want is a stray ambient instrumental track on an album full of otherwise bangers sneaking its way onto my Move Playlist. This requires manually-added playlists for each genre and mood, so as to catch any outliers, which are then added to the rules of the associated Smart Playlist. 

For example, one of Moby's earliest albums, Everything is Wrong, probably the most schizophrenic album I own, is a series of existential crises communicated in musical styles that deviate wildly between hectic club bangers, industrial punk breakdowns, mellowed-out comedown jams and transcendent processed piano instrumentals. There is no way I could classify it neatly into any genre or theme, but through these manual playlists it has songs within my top-rated Deep, Meditate, Melancholy, Move, Sleep and Yoga playlists.

And this leads to the final step, which is of course the star rating system. If I’m in a mood, a real mood, I don’t want any old melancholy song. I want only the best, the saddest, and I want to get them without skipping (which, if you go really deep in the iTunes stats, is another story waiting to be told: what are your most skipped tracks, and how did they end up at the top of this unfortunate list?). 

I used to take the approach that I assume most people do: allocate each song a star rating as one would do a movie, with the duds 1 and the greats 5. But I’m not one for snap judgments; I am rarely able to assess the worth of a song after anything less than half a dozen listens (which also says something about my concentration levels). Plus, ratings really should be evolving: passing up and down through stars as the song fades in and out of your life. 

So I start from the bottom. Every song has to earn its first star by showing something that is worth repeated listening. If not, it is doomed to forever languish star-less in the depths of my Library, likely the first to be sacrificed when I will eventually have to start deleting songs to free up space on my hard drive. Only rarely will a song jump straight to two stars, but it does happen. 

1 star songs make their way into the ‘rated’ Smart Playlists. These are rarely used, although occasionally I might chuck them on to see if there are any deserving songs hiding back there that may have been overlooked first time round. Things really start at two stars, where the (slightly misleadingly named) ‘Best’ playlists start, and are my go to for running, meditating, yoga and various types of somber states of mind. This shows how tough it is to move up the rating; it was only around a year or so ago that I had enough songs to make it worthwhile having themed 3 star playlists.

Out of a total of almost 12 and a half thousand songs, there are currently only 10 four star songs. And no 5 star songs. And I’m fine with that. Because those that make it will be those that hold up over a lifetime.