Project Discography

As you may understand, music is such a powerful source of joy in my life. Growing up in a golden age of extremely productive and skilled musicians during the 1970s and 80s, the amount of vinyl records I wanted to buy far outnumbered the ones I had the budget for.

Enter digital and streaming, that luckily changed during my lifetime. I now have access to, basically, every record ever made and released. Or, at least, way more than I could ever consume. Discover-ability of new-to-me artists is also way better and easier.

Anyhow… thinking back, I realised that it was a lot of albums I never really got to listen to. Sometimes, I’d borrow one from a friend, other times, we’d only play the hits etc. So, setting out to remedy this, I started my personal Project Discography.

The workflow is dead simple: Start with an artist you really like. Now find their list of studio albums on your streaming service of choice and start with the oldest one. Put on your headphones and listen from the beginning, in track order, through the whole album. Now, do the same with the artist’s second album. Repeat. If you’re up for it, add in the live albums too and check compilations for any previously unreleased or remixed tracks. (Feel free to skip the goofy Christmas albums, I did.)

If you try this, I promise you will get quite a few surprises and probably discover fantastic tracks that you’d never have discovered otherwise.

This far¹, I’ve completed the discographies of 40 artists, totalling 576 albums. I don’t have any reason to stop any time soon — it’s just so much great music out there.

1. as of 2024-04-24 ↩︎