A couple years ago, Apple iTunes let you give each song a star rating of 1-5 stars. It was great and powerful, and it let me use “smart playlists” to create a tiered system for my music.
Then iOS 10 came along and took away the star ratings. They might have also taken away smart playlists too. I don’t know. I had uninstalled iTunes on my computer.
Now the only way to rate a song is with “Like” or “Dislike.” It’s ridiculous. If I dislike a song, why would I have it on my phone? I would delete the sucker. Of course I like every song.
So here’s the solution I came up with.
Apple simplified their Music app. Now you have to simplify your music system.
What I did was create a new playlist called “My Music.” I dumped every song on my phone into that playlist. Without stars, there is effectively only one level of music. So I treat it that way.
I shuffle through the playlist and listen to groups of three songs. Out of the three songs, I will delete my least favorite one from my phone. I’ll do this until I reach 24 total hours of music, or about 300 songs (I buy a new album every month).
Maybe I’ll cut it back even further. I’m thinking of keeping only my favorite 100 or 200 songs on my phone. I don’t know. Minimalism. Or something like that.