I’ve found that I’m pretty good at guessing the year a song was released - as long as that year was in the 80s.

I’m not too bad at the 60s and 70s, even though I wasn’t born until 1975.

I struggle a bit with the 90s. Those were my drinking and sailing years, so it’s all a bit of a blur (no pun intended - I preferred Oasis). The decade is fairly easy to identify but I’m usually out by a year or two. I just remember - early 90s: Nirvana and Grunge, as well as pretty crap dance music; mid 90s: BritPop; mid-to-late 90s: Spice Girls, Take That, etc., and the re-emergence of Alt-Rock (Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins).

For the noughties onwards, I’m ok at identifying the artist or song, but as for the year - useless!

I’ve been trying to think why this is. My initial theory was that we’re not seeing a revolution in music styles and genres that we saw in earlier decades.

The 80s in particular were an amazingly diverse time for music. There was so much going on, each genre with its own little sub-culture. You have the New Romantics such as Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Culture Club; Goths such as The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy; Glam Metal; Ska-revival; Reggae; Synth Pop; New Wave, Thrash Metal; Post-Punk; the early days of Hip-Hop, House and Techno; and so much more.

It’s easy to be nostalgic about the 80s.

There is of course a bias underpinning my love of the 80s. Studies have shown that our musical preferences are shaped during adolescence and early teenage years. For me, that lines up with the 80s, whereas Generation Z — born in 2000 or later — really do believe that the 2010s was the best decade. So was the 80s a uniquely great decade, or is it simply, as science suggests, that I was at an age where my orbitofrontal cortex reward system was sensitive and highly engaged?

I certainly went through a dramatic evolution in musical tastes in my teens. I went from being a Bros fan in 1988 with short spiky hair, to a metalhead in 1991 with longish hair, even attending the iconic Donington Monsters of Rock Festival that year. Those extremes were short-lived.

I was never really into cool music at the time it was considered cool. I remember a group of friends being heavily in to The Smiths while I was probably listening to the great works of Stock Aitken Waterman. Now, of course, I love The Smiths.

As with many people, I went through that period when I ‘discovered’ the Beatles. I read the authorised biography of the Beatles by Hunter Davies (first published in 1968 - before the split). I love reading biographies about cultural icons because you can make it interactive by listening to, or watching, their work when you get to the corresponding chapter of the book.

In the case of the Beatles, I followed the book and listened to every album in order, analysed every song, furthered my research with thanks to Wikipedia, documentaries, YouTube and podcasts. I went all in for a while. There’s a reason why the Beatles are generally considered to be the greatest band of all time. It’s not just all the record-breaking stats and the phenomenon of Beatlemania. They transformed the music industry. Listen to their music from 1963 and compare it to 1969. Not only did their music evolve, once they gave up touring and spent more time in the studio, they became extremely innovative - pushing the boundaries of recording techniques, songwriting and production. They influenced everyone around them and shaped the evolution of the music industry the 60s and beyond. My favourite Beatles album - Revolver.

I highly recommend my interactive book experience. I’ve done the same with many other biographies from icons of music, sport, films, politics and historical figures. It’s like creating your own documentary.

The Mike Tyson autobiography is a good example. At the time the book was released, I was able to follow along and watch pretty much every fight on YouTube. Unfortunately, a lot of those videos of his early fights have since been pulled. You can of course watch the highlights of his career but it’s not the same as watching every fight and hearing, in his own words, what factors influenced his boxing style, mentality and (tragically) the direction of his career. Boxing critics argue on where he stands amongst the greats. I just know that for a time, he was unstoppable. And then, Cus D’Amato died, and Don King (and drugs) got their hooks into him. Whether you like him or not, the story is epic, Shakespearean even. Highly recommended.

Back to music and my inability to guess the year from this century.

It’s not that I don’t know music. I’m a bit of a music nerd (no surprise), but not in the traditional sense. It has been a while since I’ve regularly read music magazines or gone to gigs. No, my particular nerdiness is that for over 20 years now I have digitally collected music and rated every single song in my library. I’m a stats man. Through ratings and extensive use of smart playlists, I could recall, for instance, my favourite rock songs from 1978, or my highest rated dance tracks with a BPM (beats per minute) below 140.

Incidentally, the support for star ratings and smart playlists is the main reason I haven’t switched from Apple Music to Spotify.

My digital ratings system started on Windows, I believe around 2000. I think the app was MusicMatch Jukebox. I may be wrong. I also remember using Winamp and later Last.fm. That all changed when Apple released iTunes for Windows in 2003. I had an iPod so the easy syncing made complete sense. I made the full switch to an Apple Mac and iPhone in 2008. They’ve had me locked in ever since!

Incidentally, Yahoo acquired MusicMatch and then later killed it. Indicative of the general demise of Yahoo from an Internet giant to a footnote.

My system is simple. If I find a song I instantly like I add it to my library and give it an initial 3 star rating. Many of my playlists have criteria that start with songs rated 3* or greater. These songs will usually go in to my Recently Liked playlist. I regularly review this playlist and try and keep in under 100 songs. Before removing the song I’ll review the rating and maybe add it to one of my other playlists.

If I’m on the fence about a song I might add it to my library anyway. This then shows up in my Unrated playlist. It usually takes 3 or 4 listens to each track before I’ve decided on a rating. Sometimes more. Unfortunately for me, this often means that the yearly Apple Replay playlists that Apple automatically generate are dominated by songs which perhaps weren’t my favourites from the year.

If the song is from an artist I already like I’ll usually add the associated album to my library. If it’s from a new artist, I might quickly scan through the album to get an idea whether the album stands up to the quality of the single.

I once made the mistake of adding loads of classic 70s albums to my library in one go. This sent my Unrated playlist up to about 2000 songs. It took me nearly 2 years to get through it. It became more of a chore than enjoyable.

I now find that I add a lot less new music to my library. Again, studies suggest that once you reach middle age you stop listening to new music. There’s a reason that BBC Radio 1 and 2 have different demographics. I still listen to new music but it’s certainly not at the same rate as previous years.

I think it’s partly a reflection of age, but also has something to do with the times in which we live. We are in an age of abundant options. It was once second nature to pick up a book while listening to an album on my Walkman. Today, it could take me half an an hour to decide whether to watch a film, TV show, or Youtube, or listen to an audiobook or podcast, perhaps doomscroll the news, get lost in the nonsense on social media, or catch up my never ending RSS blogs feed. I end up falling asleep in decision paralysis.

It was easier when I had a full-time job. Music helped me concentrate. Now I find I have to make time for music and rely on reminders. I rely on the Friday notification of new album releases on my phone, or the notification from BBC Sounds that there’s a new episode of my favourite radio show - Trevor Nelson’s Rhythm Nation.

My early years were influenced by watching Top of the Pops, listening to the Top 40 countdown on Radio 1 on a Sunday, and reading Smash Hits magazine. I had no money to collect physical albums. It was the days of recording songs off the radio on to cassette tapes. The first ever single I bought with own money was I Wanna Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston. Whitney Houston remains my favourite female vocalist of all time. That would have been on vinyl. If only we had all kept all our vinyl records from back in the day. Who knew they would make a comeback?

In the 90s I was living on warships so had limited options. In the early 90s that would be a handful of cassette tapes. Later, mp3 players came along but storage was minute. It wasn’t until the iPod came along in 2001 that you could fit ‘1000 songs in your pocket’.

I can remember deployments based on the small number of albums I had on repeat. Each deployment had its own soundtrack. For example, my memory of a specific Arabian Gulf deployment is sunbathing on the flight deck in scorching heat listening to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis, and Seal II on constant repeat. That would put it around 1995.

Today, things are very different. We have millions of songs in our pocket. For a long while my listening was dominated by playlists. I think it’s the same for most people. More recently, I’ve made a conscious effort to listen to full albums, with songs in order, not shuffled. It’s a different experience. The great albums tell a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s not just a collection of songs.

Despite my Apple Music subscription, I’ve found the Apple Music app is not the best option for listening to albums. You can of course search, or navigate, to a specific album, but let’s say you want to listen to a smart playlist of your 5* albums.

First of all, It’s 2025 and the Apple Music app on iOS still doesn’t allow us to create smart playlists. We have to first create them in the Mac app.

Secondly, there seems to be a long running bug in iTunes, that has carried through to the Apple Music app, where playlists don’t remember your selected view type or sort criteria. For example, in my nerdiness, I have separate playlists containing the best albums (based on my ratings) for every single year going back to the early 70s. I’ll set the view type of the playlist to ‘as Album’, sorted based on album rating, but later, both on iOS and MacOS, it will revert to the default, which is as a playlist of all songs based on the order that songs were added to the playlist. First world problems, I know, but frustrating.

One other problem is that Apple lets you specify the year, but this is the year of the song, not album. There is no separate filter option for album year. This means that sometimes albums might be split across 2 years as album release date and song release date are not always the same. What I end up doing is creating a separate manual playlist for each year based on the results of the corresponding smart playlist. You can see the Album Year in the metadata for an album, it’s just not a filtering option.

On iOS i get around a lot of these problems by using the excellent app Marvis which let’s you create your own customised version of Apple Music, and includes the ability to create smart playlists and keeps the albums view.

I have lots of playlists and playlist groups. I have an A List group - this contains the playlists I play most often. Then a B List. I have a Favourite Artists group. This contains playlists for dozens of my favourite bands and artists where each playlist just includes the songs from the artists I’ve rated as 3* or above - filtering the wheat from the chaff. I have a grouping with smart playlists for different genres. Where the genre is a favourite of mine, such as Soul/RnB, I have separate groupings for these. For example, my Slow Jams playlist is very different to my Motown playlist.

I have a party grouping, with playlists I’ve created over the years for home BBQs, friends round for dinner, or even parties for specific events (for example when we were lucky enough to live in an apartment that had arguably the best view in Brisbane for the annual RiverFire event). I find it hard to delete these playlists - they’re a little snapshot of time.

I have a grouping for Movie and TV soundtrack playlists that I’ve created. If I watch a film and really enjoy the score or soundtrack, I’ll often create my own playlist if I can’t find one shared by another Apple Music user. It’s easy to find the music from a film with help from sites such as TuneFind. I’ve contributed to TuneFind myself when I’ve created a playlist that’s either missing entirely or is missing certain tracks.

I even have different Xmas playlists. My Classy Christmas playlist is very different from my Party Christmas playlist. I have no real naming convention. Sometimes it’s obvious, like ’80s Power Ballads', and sometimes less obvious, like ‘Teenage Wasteland’. I know what they all mean.

You get the picture.

As of now, I have rated close to 26,000 songs. It would take me 71 days to listen to them all. It’s a similar story for films, but let’s leave it there. I’m starting to re-think my life choices.