It’s a very unoriginal process. It’s a very easy and simple task. But who would even care?

The only people who would care are those who care about monuments or trophies… or memories. Maybe? I had a feeling that they would care because they’re the ones paying attention to the progress, to the showing, to the line that makes things flow.

The most important aspect of these stations is their music… that would be reasonable to say. But there’s a catch. Many of the popular stations of the day (the ones that I am considering here) have a dynamic, living playlist. Songs are what define the station, but the songs change. Some songs stay, some songs don’t. If I tune into the station on January 21, 2025 and hear five songs, there’s no guarantee that those same five songs will play on January 21, 2026. I might hear two of them in 2026 but not the other three. They might all be gone, “extinct” in a sense, never to be heard on that station again. But when we build a record of those songs, for that time in the future when they are not there anymore, we will remember the songs that brought us through the moment.

So the process of compiling playlists from radio stations… it’s very unoriginal. Technically, though, these stations don’t contain an exact “playlist” that is heard on-air. They’re just showing samples and collections. They are using a certain group of songs, but at the end of the day, it’s just a selection of songs and will be different as time goes on. New songs come, old songs go. I don’t own the playlists either. I’m just compiling groups of songs.

I’m trying to build a monument, a sign of a playlist from the past that was existent but will soon be nonexistent. This is the generation that has been presented to us in the moment. Enjoy the playlist, enjoy the show. Know that it’s all temporary. That’s what I had done, and that’s what helped me to grow up.

Doing so will get us away from the mentality of just listening to what sounds good or what is popular… and will push us closer to the sense of going deeper, finding links to the past to what we heard before, and considering the messages of all of the songs, having a consideration of those in the past in addition to those in the present. That’s one step closer to uncovering the music.