Jukeboxing Into Modern Music

At some point in adulthood, for me it started in my third decade of life, you start to notice that you know less and less about modern music, television, movies, et cetera. Some of us start early in our over-embrace of nostalgic media. Others it’s all looking forward until they die. Most of us though, me included, start indulging more in the past than the present. I’ve tried various times to break that by listening to nothing but Top 40 stations on streaming services. I end up getting pretty tired of it quickly though so after a day or so the whole experiment is over.

As luck would have it someone pointed me to this webapp called JukeboxDaily . The site lists every #1 Top 40 song for the day for every year that there is data, going back to 1959. Rather than working my way through endless hours of new music I now have the ability to just listen to the most listened to song of the day for each year.

The grid view allows me to click each year in reverse chronological order and then play the song in the embedded YouTube player. There is a playlist generation feature but due to limitations of anonymous playlist length from YouTube it doesn’t fully populate it. For now I kind of like that because it forces me to read the song title and artist names. That may help me remember them somewhat.

So using this as a tool my methodology to try to get more plugged into pop music will be to listen to this list in reverse chronological order at least for 21st century songs every day. I’ll do that at least for the US Billboard Hot 100 list if not both it and UK. If this proves sustainable it’d be kind of cool to get the top 5 songs of the day. I’ll maybe ask the developer if there would be a way to have a drop down for the position in the list from 10 to 1 at least.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of days already and I’m already digging some of the newer music. I’m also realizing how much of the music at the turn of the century I really didn’t like. Perhaps it was that era that tripped me up and pushed me into the whole retro-only music category (although it wasn’t quite retro yet).