The "album problem" is, of course, the fact that our music listening habits have changed over the past decade and the value of a well-thought-out album is not nearly what it once was. This is in large part due to the fact that it's easy for people to create playlists with a billion different songs to choose from, recommendation algorithms, "Discovery Weekly" playlists, and whatever else the streaming services can throw at us.

I may not speak for all of us, but I've personally not been able to fully consume a new album for quite a while now, finding that I gravitate toward a few songs/singles that get dumped into a separate playlist. I don't like this and I miss the days that I would discover deep cuts in the back of an album that I listened to ad nauseum.

I present to you the "Six Disc Changer" playlist. The rules are simple:

1. Create a new playlist in Spotify, Tidal, or your chosen platform. Call it "Six Disc Changer"
2. Add six FULL albums to the playlist
3. Force yourself to listen to the playlist -- maybe not exclusively -- but a fair amount. Imagine you're driving around in your 2002 Honda Civic and the only music available to you is what you've got in your CD changer.
4. Any time you want to add a new album, you must remove an old album. You should only have six CDs loaded up at any time.

If you want to take the concept a few steps further...

5. Any time you remove a CD, add it to a separate playlist called "CD Catalogue".
6. Any time you want to add a new CD to the catalogue, you must "purchase" it with an "allowance" of your choosing. I'm going with 1 new album per week. You can swap out albums from your Catalogue playlist freely, but new albums must be "purchased." This will simulate scarcity, which was a large part of what drove us to listen to albums over and over again.

But... why?

My goal is to get back to listening to full albums and truly taking them in. The best way I can think of to do that is to simulate the way things used to be. By using a streaming service instead of, say, just going back to CDs or records, you get the benefits of convenience, Last.fm, easy Bluetooth, etc.

As for what's in my CD changer right now, I've got:

1. Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
2. The Antlers - Need Nothing
3. Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
4. Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
5. George Harrison - Living in the Material World
6. Bob Moses - Battle Lines

Is it dumb? Probably. It's been fun so far and my music listening experience has been much more focused.

TLDR/Warning: this might be a tedious read. But I'm curious if I could have gone about rating my albums better.

I tend to simply either favourite an album or not. The idea of giving albums and tracks marks out of five stars seems tedious, difficult to match to how I feel and just doesn't match how my head works. But my collection has grown over the decades and I've been bed bound a lot lately, so I'm trying to organise/categorise based on my feelings towards the albums rather than genre. I'm also hoping to rejuvenate my old interest in music (playing in a band and recording for a living took the shine off of casual listening for me). I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try out, so I rated songs from over 50 albums.

I came up with a rigid and hopefully balanced definition for each rating:

• 1 star - Dislike. I hope I never hear this song again (but I'll keep it purely because it's part of the album)
• 2 stars - Neutral. It doesn't annoy me, but it's too generic to be interesting
• 3 stars - Sometimes this song hits the spot.
• 4 stars - This song usually hits the spot.
• 5 stars - This song always hits the spot.

Then I rate the album out of five stars based on the average of the song ratings. The result is that no albums got 5 stars, a seven got 4 stars, the vast majority of albums are rated at 3 or 2 stars. Even among the 3-star albums, some I like much more than others depending on whether they contain mostly consistent 3-star songs or half 4-star songs and half 2-star songs.

I wonder if the lack of 5-star albums is because of the definitions I gave each of the 1-5-star possibilities. For example, I don't know if any song "always hits the spot". Or maybe it's just that I'm not as into my music as I used to be.

Anyway, I thought maybe people interested in music and data might have thoughts on going about this differently. It's worth asking before I do the next 1,000 albums :) Maybe you'd define each of the 5 stars differently. Any takers?

Edit: thanks to everyone for reading all this and commenting their thoughts. I have a system I'm happy with now, but always happy to continue to chat with fellow (and reluctant) pedants about this.