[HN Gopher] How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify
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How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify
Author : xdavidhu
Score : 72 points
Date : 2026-01-04 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.xdavidhu.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.xdavidhu.me)
| donkeyboy wrote:
| Cool idea. One thing the author might like: if you sign up to
| lastfm, it tracks all of your music plays. So you can go through
| the data and see what you were listening yo each month/week
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Librefm or listenbrainz as well
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| Listenbrainz has a really intuitive and permissive api! I was
| just building my own tracker app with it yesterday:
| https://github.com/caminante-blanco/bowie-tracker
| xdavidhu wrote:
| Last.fm is great! I do like the breakdowns you can do there,
| especially the query for the top songs/artists of the last 30
| days, year & all time.
|
| It's not as seamless to jump in and listen to stuff on lastfm
| though.
| g0wda wrote:
| Nice! I have my lastfm when I need a throw back. They still allow
| yearly views
| nonoesp wrote:
| I create a playlist for each month (e.g., 2026.01) inside of a
| folder of the corresponding year (e.g., 2026) and add new tracks
| there (instead of using Spotify likes). This allows me to jump
| back to a specific year/month. You can also hit play on the
| folder to play all songs from a specific year.
|
| I used to have a single Inbox playlist to save music and keep the
| date when I saved each song.
| afandian wrote:
| The words 'archive' and 'Spotify' do not go together naturally!
| (Ditto any subscription service).
|
| From the title I was expecting something like "how I archived my
| Spotify memories in a plain text file".
| walthamstow wrote:
| It's still valuable stuff. What I wouldn't give for a text file
| containing a list of everything I had on my iPod classic circa
| 2006.
| stared wrote:
| Fortunately, there is a way to extract song lists - via API,
| official export, or even MCP.
| https://github.com/marcelmarais/spotify-mcp-server
|
| I recommend doing so, even as a backup.
| xdavidhu wrote:
| Oh this is great, i might run this over my backups to retain
| the artists/titles as well.
| xdavidhu wrote:
| It is relatively easy (currently) to take a playlist and back
| it up as a plain text file.
|
| CTRL+A, CTRL+C from web or desktop puts a newline separated
| plain text list of songs on your clipboard.
|
| Main risk is that the list is in the format of
| "https[:]//open[.]spotify[.]com/track/[song-id]", so Spotify
| may break the lookup of these IDs in the future.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > so Spotify may break the lookup of these IDs in the future.
|
| Luckily, Spotify seems pretty good at backwards
| compatibility. `spotify:user:$username` still seems to work
| in the search-bar, must have worked for almost 20 years now,
| and given that artists themselves use those track URIs and
| IDs, I'm sure Spotify will be even more careful with those
| than search query syntax.
| fragmede wrote:
| Anna's Archive would disagree.
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| Of potential interest, listenbrainz supports uploading your
| Spotify backup raw, and will keep it all in a easily parseseable,
| query-able backup. Combine that with a good scrobbler, and you
| never need to be at Spotify's whims again
| phatfish wrote:
| I enjoy looking back at what I had been listening to in previous
| years as well. But playlists in Spotify have a "Date added"
| column, so you get a chronology from there. I guess splitting
| them out into years means you can shuffle a single year. Apart
| from that it seems to just complicate the process.
|
| My "Starred" playlist has the first song added in 2010. When
| Spotify decided "Like" was now going to be how to favourite songs
| i just ignored it and kept using the Starred playlist.
|
| I do wish the play history and play counts were kept longer.
| Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime play
| counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.
| xdavidhu wrote:
| > Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime
| play counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.
|
| I wonder if they provide this data if you do a "download your
| information" request. I remember some discussion about how much
| info that archive had:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681289
| arccy wrote:
| https://listenbrainz.org/ or last.fm are better if you actually
| want to track these things.
| deguzman-cloud wrote:
| i created a _very rough_ app that creates monthly /weekly
| playlists based on your listening history for this exact purpose!
| getting a commercial spotify api key is impossible so i never
| fully finished it.
|
| https://github.com/matt-dz/hathr-backend
| arccy wrote:
| i tried something similar too... but last year they started
| returning less data in the api, especially around analysis
| which was really annoying
| sylens wrote:
| I do something very similar but with seasons - I have a "Winter
| 2024", "Spring 2025", etc. playlist and its really nice to go
| back and listen to what I was into at the time
| analogpixel wrote:
| Has anyone ever tried something like this with notes
| (obsidian/notion). Wondering what it would look like to restart
| your notes each year with the ability to look back at previous
| years.
| _ink_ wrote:
| I have Aphantasia and SDAM, so how I experience memories is
| vastly different from most others. But even for me music helps me
| to recall memories otherwise lost. I also discovered this trick
| and use it to get reminded of certain memories or people.
| aed wrote:
| This is cool! I love stuff like this, it's fun to use stuff like
| this to see the passage of time a little more clearly.
|
| Similar ideas:
|
| I've been keeping notes in Roam Research for nearly 6 years now.
| Whenever I'm writing notes for that day, I'll go back to the same
| day 5, 4, 3, etc. years ago and see what I was working on.
|
| I also recently went through the trouble of getting all of my
| running data into a spreadsheet. I started in 2018 and have gone
| through three different apps. Currently on my to-vibe-code-list:
| a little app that takes all of my runs from Apple Health and
| makes a neat dashboard showing pace, miles, routes, etc. over the
| years.
| largbae wrote:
| I don't do the year thing, I just keep a single, ever-growing
| playlist of any song that triggers a memory. I use it as the
| default while driving, and take "phoned in" requests like a radio
| station to allow my kids to override. Some days they do that a
| lot, other days they ask questions about what memory each song
| means to me. I love it either way.
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| I do something slightly different. I create a new playlist every
| month, sometimes songs carry over from the previous month,
| sometimes not. New songs come in, old songs go out. I can go back
| to any month since late 2011 and see what I was listening to at
| the time.
| purplezooey wrote:
| Really like this idea. The archive is automatic! Do you have to
| organize into folders etc. or just one big list.
| vvoyer wrote:
| I do the same, I named them "SelecTunes YYMM" and been doing it
| since 2018
| operatorius wrote:
| tangentially related
|
| I've decided to part ways with my physical record collection.
| Before putting everything up for sale on discogs I decided I will
| listen and sit through every record I have. Going through each
| brought back many memories of the times I listened to the record
| the most. It was enough just to take it into my hands, take it
| out, look at the cover.
|
| I rarely feel anything like that when I play music via digital
| means. As if memories _stick_ better on physical mediums.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| >To maintain the integrity & not override the memories associated
| with specific songs, I rarely listen to or re-save songs from the
| past years. Sometimes I give myself exceptions, though,
| especially with remixes. ;)
|
| I listen to music as a form of enjoyment, and I can't imagine
| restricting the music I listen to arbitrarily, for seemingly no
| gain. To each their own, but it's hard for me to understand how
| this is making the author happy.
| rurban wrote:
| I do more, with real physical offline archives for every year,
| without Spotify premium. Since 2008 or so. I download all of my
| Best of YEAR songs with one of the Spotify archivers into a
| playlist (there's one online service also), copy those list to my
| phone and got the archive. Holes are filled with YouTube rippers.
|
| I've worked as music editor of a local private radio and there I
| collected tons of songs after getting rid of my huge and
| expensive LP archive. Even KTRU allows now digital, they were LP-
| only for decades.
| namenumber wrote:
| Seems I'm not the only person doing something like this then.
|
| Personally i started a "To Remember" playlist in about 2009 and
| have been adding every single track I've liked enough since to
| said playlist. By now its 4127 songs!
|
| With the timestamps its a great way to relive past periods of my
| life, and also I can put it on shuffle and get the soundtrack of
| my life. Been a great boon in my life for a very long time.
|
| Also, to keep track of albums I've listened to i keep a "Where
| I've Been" list where the first track of every album I've
| listened to in its entirety goes. Its a small way to fight the
| ephemerality of listening to an album in the digital environment.
|
| I actually i scrolled through the entire list just two days ago
| and bathed in the memories, was fun to see all the places I had
| been and forgotten about.
|
| I really do miss having a rack of CDs to let my eyes float over
| for the memories, and the digital "equivalent" is a brittle
| substitute, but it has enhanced my life in many ways so I've come
| to accept the tradeoff.
| jphorism wrote:
| Cool to see that it pays off to have split things up by season!
|
| having worked on the AI Playlist feature at Spotify (which is
| agentic) -- one thing you can try to prompt is "give me songs
| that sound <vibe> from my <liked songs | playlist called "X">.
|
| An extension of this is "give me a sequence of N tracks from each
| of <list of playlist names for each past year> that all evoke
| <vibe / memory / activity>". Could be a fun prompt to play with
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(page generated 2026-01-04 23:00 UTC)