365 Days, 365 Songs - Introduction

Everybody tries to follow through on their New Year's resolutions. Join a gym, lose weight, get a new job, move to a new place, go somewhere, etc. Of course, most people fail at them pretty quickly, especially if the goal is too unobtainable, has a time limit, or they just plain forget about it. This year, I have six resolutions I wish to achieve, all of which are pretty easy to do. However, even I'm about to fail one of them come February 1st largely due to my time management, the allure and excitement for Fire Emblem Engage, and a significant lack of utilizing Netflix. For those wondering, this resolution is to watch at least one premiering Netflix film in their given month. To make matters worst, this is a redo, as I tried to do this last year and also beefed it!

Thankfully, I'm currently still on course with one of my main resolutions: to make each day of 2023 special, I plan on buying one song from Apple iTunes per day. Hooray for consumerism!

So why would I want to do this? Like anyone, I love music but I have been a cheapskate and a swindler with it for quite some time now. Instead of actually buying songs or albums from digital storefronts, or even daring to be like the cool kids and download stuff illegally, I more often than not just listened to them or watched their music videos on YouTube, over and over again. Yes, I did buy CDs back when they were still a thing but even with the convenience of iTunes, I just shied away from buying music for no good reason. And then Spotify had to come in and give me even more of an incentive. Just how bad has this affected me? It has largely been a thing since my college years, where I would stupidly refuse to buy anything from iTunes unless I got an Apple iTunes card as a gift. What a total goof I was.

Now anyone can just go on a spending spree and buy 365 songs in a small amount of time. To make the resolution matter more, I set up some ground rules. They are as followed:

1. I must buy one song from iTunes per day.

Pretty basic and easy to understand. If there are any special sales on iTunes or I might have future plans to travel and/or be offline, purchasing songs in advance is allowed. This has already has been implemented, as there was a very convenient sale on rock songs for $0.69 each at the start of the year.

I'm also not going to penalize myself or fail the resolution if I forget to buy a song one day. All that really matters in the end is that I have a full playlist of 365 songs to represent the 365 days of the year by 11:59 PM on December 31st 2023.

2. Each song has to be meaningful to me. It can't just be a random purchase.

There are a lot of songs that mean the world to me. They helped shaped my life. They're forever tied with special memories. Or simply they moved me so emotionally that they have an eternal place in the jukebox in my mind. And yet, I don't have them in my purchased digital music collection. So I'm going to try and rectify that slight, especially if I have put off purchasing them for a long time.

To keep this rule pure, I refuse to buy songs mainly just for the sake of it. For example, The Eagles' "Take It Easy". Yeah, unlike The Dude, I enjoy the song but it doesn't mean much to me. I could make the case that it is meaningful because it always reminds me of a 90s television commercial for a local radio station that featured a snippet of the song's chorus. But that's really it. On the other hand, I do have certain memories and stories in regards to "Hotel California" and "I Can't Tell You Why".

3. Full albums can not count.

Quickly filling up the list with a bunch of albums is just incredibly lame, even if they happen to be some of my favorite albums of all time. Prince's Diamonds & Pearls? Daft Punk's Discovery? The Beastie Boys' License To Ill? KMFDM's Nihil? HAIM's Days Are Gone? Kate Bush's Hounds of Love and The Sensual World? All amazing, all meaningful to me, and all obtained through legal means (copying from CDs or free downloads through local libraries).

But that also means that I have not digitally purchased them. Rather than buying them now just to fill out the playlist or even select a song or two from them, I want to treat them with the respect they and other albums deserve and just purchase them separately.

4. No songs released in 2023 can count.

Pretty straight forward. Another easy way to just pad out the list. Even if let's say a special memory is created this year for me with a 2023 song, there are just so many other older songs and memories that richly deserve the spotlight.

That pretty much sums everything up. Now that I let this out of the bag, I'm of course not just going to keep the rest of this resolution/project to myself. So, at the end of each month this year, I will reveal all of the songs that I purchased and explain the significance of them. To spice up matters, some months will feature a special theme. For example, one of my favorite national selection competitions for Eurovision, Sweden's Melodifestivalen, runs through every Saturday next month so expect February's list to be filled with a lot of Melopop. And of course, I hope you enjoy this journey through my musical heart and maybe find a new song or two or an old favorite to add to your own personal music collection.