Plethora

New Top 40

December 11th, 2007

I have worked about 3 hours on a new top 40.

I want to tell you my process so you can make your own and post them, too.

First, I literally made a playlist with every song I had in iTunes. First taking out books on tape, then rap to make this a clean top 40. Also, because right now I’m mostly listening to rap, and so songs that I don’t actually like in the long run,but like RIGHT NOW could make it and then in a year I’d be like, dumb move.

So, That narrowed it down to 5,000 songs. I then went through and there were entire albums and artists I could immediately rule out. Through Abba and Weird Al I got rid of a lot, but still had albums from artists I didn’t mind, which left about 500 songs. Then I just picked and chose through there. I had way too many from the same artists and I filtered out the songs I like RIGHT NOW. Songs I want to put on infinite repeat but will get sick of in a week or two.

So, I have my pick of the litter. I also have 150 songs. So now comes the tough work. I then narrowed it down to 80 and every song at that point was difficult to let go. I then had to start thinking, OK, I love this song, but, do I love the way it sounds, the lyrics, the instruments, or what the song means to me? With a greater emphasis on what the songs mean to me.

That was finally whittled down to 40. Now the trickiest part, I ran each song with a 1-5 ranking (8 in each category). It makes it much easier to rank that way. I then look at each bracket and rank them 1-8. And I have my list.

So, if I have my list, why isn’t there #40 here? Because, I wasn’t satisfied, there were a lot of songs in my 5 bracket I was thinking, I like this song over some song that didn’t make the cut?? So, I went back to the full playlist and spend another 30 minutes going through the 6000 songs to put into overflow. So, now I have 38 songs in overflow, 40 songs in a top 40 ranked, and figure at most 5 songs could be swapped. So, tomorrow you may have a final listing.

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