The Your Music collections have baffled me for awhile now.
Very early on I decided that I was going to use my saved songs playlist (Your Music - songs) to quickly keep track of my favorite songs as I listened. That way I could go through and listen to those to see how my tastes evolve and to share a more personal playlist with others.
Saving albums and artists has, for me, been a way to keep track of starting points. I can look through them to find something I want to listen to for a much longer time than a single song. Being partial to the radio feature for exploring new music, I don't necessarily care about each and every song by an artist or in an album so much as I care about the collection and its use as a seed for more music.
Similarly, saving playlists is a way of creating specific collections that wouldn't exist elsewhere or of finding other people's collections so that I don't have to trust the radio to create something appealing for a few hours.
Instead,
When I save an album, every single song is also as if it has been saved and the artist as well.
When I save a single song, I also inadvertendly save both the artist and the album.
When I save an artist I save it beside the artists of every song or album I've saved, like that one song "feat. JAY-Z" or "Dmitri Shostakovich".
Most of my songs are saved from albums.
Most of my albums are saved from songs.
Most of my artists are saved from albums and songs.
If I want to listen to a song I saved I have to listen to hundreds of songs needlessly populated from albums I was interested in.
If I want to check which artists I've gone out of my way to follow I have to sift through essentially my entire saved song playlist and saved album playlist. Where I had wanted a list of artists I might overlook if I hadn't saved them, I now have a playlist that forced me to overlook them by ignoring that I've singled them out.
If I want to listen to an album that I thought might catch my eye when I'm in a particular mood, I have no way of distinguishing it from an album that just happened to have a song from my saved songs playlist on it.
Conclusion/TLDR;
Despite having specifically saved songs, artists and albums, I wouldn't recognize almost any of them. I save my albums as playlists (displacing actual playlists) and my artists as radio stations. Every single one of the Your Music playlists is buried by the contents of the others. It is most definitely not my music. Please allow me to save songs, albums, artists, and playlists as the fundamentally different data types that they are. It is useless to create and cultivate the distinction if they aren't treated as such.
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random