For some time now and almost without realising it, I’ve been building a digital scaffold for my memories.

Social media is one example, but I’ve barely been using this in recent years and prefer to add what little I do share to Micro.blog.

But there are more subtle aspects. My IMDb lists hold a record of all the films I’ve watched since 2004. My (more recent) Letterboxd account also includes the date and with whom I watched the film. Last.fm captures music I’ve listened to, and concerts I’ve attended are kept in Setlist.fm. All the books I’ve read are catalogued in LibraryThing, which I’ve written about before.

The more I think about it, the more scaffolding boards I discover. This is a topic I will be returning to…

I first published a list of my 100 favourite songs on my old Wordpress site back in 2010.

I revisit the list often and wrestle with the quality of my choices. Sometimes I think it needs updating, but honestly it’s hard to identify what could be replaced. So here’s my list, in no particular order:

1. The Prodigy – No Good Start The Dance
2. The Beatles – In My Life
3. Radiohead – The Bends
4. The Smiths – Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want
5. Prefab Sprout – Faron Young
6. Jay Z & Lincoln Park – Numb
7. Everything But The Girl – Missing
8. Arctic Monkeys – When The Sun Goes Down
9. Bright Eyes – First Day Of My Life
10. James – Hymn From A Village
11. The Proclaimers – The First Attack
12. Simple Minds – Speed Your Love
13. The Passengers – Miss Sarajevo
14. Dr Dre – Forget About Dre
15. Eminem – Stan
16. House Of Pain – Jump Around
17. Des’ree – Kissing you
18. Portishead – Numb
19. Oasis – Live Forever
20. Hue & Cry – Labour Of Love
21. Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel – White Lines
22. Don McLean – American Pie
23. The Cure – In Between Days
24. The Streets – Never Been To Church
25. The Libertines – Don’t Look Back Into The Sun
26. Paolo Nutini – Candy
27. Cowboy Junkies – You Will Be Loved
28. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist
29. Justin Timberlake – Cry Me A River
30. Belle & Sebastian – Dirty Dream Number Two
31. The Specials – Message To You Rudy
32. Faithless – Insomnia
33. Amy Winehouse – You Know I’m No Good
34. David Bowie – Starman
35. Cake – I Will Survive
36. Soft Cell – Tainted Love
37. George Michael – Jesus To A Child
38. The Verve – The Drugs Don’t Work
39. Coldplay – In My Place
40. The Rolling Stones – You Can’t Always Get What You Want
41. Smokey Robinson – Tears Of A Clown
42. Michael Jackson – Give In To Me
43. The Killers – When We Were Young
44. The Strokes – Hard To Explain
45. Snow Patrol – Run
46. The Coral – Dreaming Of You
47. Prince – When Doves Cry
48. Roberta Flack – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
49. The Beatles – Hey Jude
50. Dolly Parton – I Will Always Love You
51. Johnny Cash – Hurt
52. Paul Weller – You Do Something To Me
53. The Kinks – Lola
54. Bob Marley – Redemption Song
55. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
56. Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
57. Joy Division – She’s Lost Control
58. The Clash – Should I Stay Or Should I Go
59. The Undertones – Teenage Kicks
60. REM – Losing My Religion
61. The Pixies – Hey
62. The Pogues – The Old Main Drag
63. The Stone Roses – I Am The Resurrection
64. The Jam – Beat Surrender
65. The Who – My Generation
66. Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Scar Tissue
67. Ouklast – Hey Ya
68. Jimi Hendrix – All Along The Watchtower
69. Lou Reed – Perfect Day
70. ABBA – Lay All Your Love On Me
71. Jay Z – Lucifer
72. The Kings Of Leon – Sex On Fire
73. The Waterboys – Fisherman’s Blues
74. Travis – Sing
75. Cameo – Word Up
76. Air – All I Need
77. Violent Femmes – Blister In The Sun
78. Simply Red – Stars
79. Muse – Plug In Baby
80. Ian Brown – F.E.A.R
81. Underworld – Born Slippy
82. Pulp – Sorted
83. Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy
84. Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out
85. Stevie Wonder – Superstition
86. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
87. Morrissey – First Of The Gang To Die
88. The Smiths – Handsome Devil
89. The Clash – Should I Stay Or Should I Go
90. Kraftwerk – The Model
91. Blondie – Denis
92. The Zombies – Time Of The Season
93. Radiohead – Exit Music (For A Film)
94. Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons – Beggin’
95. Lauryn Hill – Sweetest Thing
96. The Fugees – Ready Or Not
97. Kate Bush – Cloudbursting
98. New Order – Shellshock
99. Panjabi MC – Jogi
100. Badly Drawn Boy – Shining

How I catalogue my music has evolved since I first started doing it over 10 years ago. In this article I’ll share how I started and how things have changed.

My first compact disc player was a 21st birthday gift from my parents. The first album I listened to, also a gift, was I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got by Sinéad O’Connor.

Music was one of the first things I started cataloguing and there were several aspects to it.

First there was my collection of CDs. In 2009 I found a simple Windows application – Orange CD – which did the job well. The application made it easy to enter albums by barcode, by scanning the disc in the drive or manually. It also allowed the collection to be published online. At the time of writing my collection is still there.

Even before I finished cataloguing my CDs I’d begun to rip them to my PC’s hard disk. This was the 2nd aspect to cataloguing my music. Once all my CDs had been ripped, I had a digital version of the collection. I didn’t give much thought to how my digital collection was organised. By default albums are ripped to folders of the same name. Album folders sit inside artist folders. Doing something other than this default would simply have created more work.

When you have enough of them even compressed MP3 files take up too much space. I moved them over to the cloud after taking out my first Dropbox subscription in 2016. More recently I’ve moved all my files and folders to iCloud.

The 3rd aspect to my music cataloguing was certainly the easiest. Around the same time I started cataloguing my physical music collection, I also started to track my listening. The iPod Touch was already 2 years old and listening via apps was common. To begin with I “scrobbled” music using a custom app. In time Last FM was able to link to streaming services and track the music I listened to on those services.

It’s interesting to look at my listening trends over 12 years as a Last FM member. At the moment I don’t listen to much of anything. But there have been times when I’ve been a heavy user of streaming services. Anyone taking a close look will see a strangely eclectic library.

These days I still have physical CDs. But really I hold on to them as mementos. Before getting rid of more than half my collection I made playlists on Spotify of all the albums I owned. Whenever I want to enjoy the album in full I can now do so from my Spotify library.

Of course Spotify doesn’t have everything. So for those albums I owned that weren’t available I used an app called Cloudbeats. It’s a simple media player for cloud music files. Although it links to most of the main services when I moved to iCloud recently I discovered it wasn’t supported. I’ll need to find another solution to this in time but for now it’s not a big issue.

How I catalogue my music may have changed significantly since I started. But I continue to enjoy it and I remain on the lookout for improvements I can make.