Can We Ever Have Too Much Good Music?

No. Not if my 2024 was anything to go by.

Happy New Year everyone. Did you make any resolutions yet? I only had one in 2024, and I am happy to say I kept to it.¹ I vowed that, as I heard good new songs, I would add them to a Best of 2024 Playlist rather than just enjoy them and forget about them. And I kept to my word.

…More or less. There were dozens of times that a great tune popped up on a radio show, a podcast, a playlist, a Mixcloud, and either I didn’t catch the name, or I didn’t have my phone handy or was otherwise engaged. There are also those songs that exist on other platforms but not on Qobuz. Nonetheless, I did my best, and the result is a Playlist currently some 206 tracks – and artists, it’s one song an act only – long. Click on the image below or follow this link to start listening.²

206 songs is a lot of music. 14 hrs, 08 minutes, and 08 seconds worth of music in my case, or certainly enough to take you through your waking hours this New Year’s Day. And I’m not even done with it yet. It’s a mark of both how much good music there is being released right now, and the fact that there is no one dominant platform for exposure the way that Radio 1 in my British youth and MTV in my American early adulthood monopolized the airwaves, that I have spent Christmas week frantically but joyfully trying to catch up with what I missed. Just yesterday (Dec 30^th), I was equal parts shocked and yet totally unsurprised to discover that I had heard less than ten of Pitchfork’s Top 50 albums of the year, even in part. But I have also heard only 3 or 4 of NPR Music host Bob Boilen’s Top 20 albums of the year – even in part – and only half a dozen of his Top 30 songs, and Bob is someone whose music taste I trust. Truly, we are overloaded with the good stuff.

Of course, this might actually indicate that I am barking up the wrong musical tree, that my massive playlist is massively mediocre. But it isn’t, I assure you. It’s fantastic. Here, listen while you read. Yes, I made a point of consciously bookmarking lesser known acts and their one-off singles as they came across my radar, but the tastemakers on whom I relied upon for these recommendations are equally as cool as Bob Boilen, and far less patronizing than Pitchfork. They’re the tastemakers I shouted out back on this post – How I Find New Music - from the middle of 2024, one of my most popular of the year not coincidentally. They are the music-loving DJs who populate the likes of The Face Radio, Louder Than War Radio, Portobello Radio, Totally Wired Radio, Maker Park Radio and more. They’re the music magazines I occasionally still purchase, the Substackers whose genre-specific integrity I take for gospel, my friend John Matthews’ ever-evolving Latest Shit and my friend Manuel Camblor’s series of The Joy of Low Numbers playlists. They’re also drawn from Qobuz’s own weekly recommendations, which are refreshingly more eclectic at times than those of a certain Spotify.

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My playlist feels thrilling diverse, at least in range of age. I have acts on my list who were making music when I first started listening in the early 1970s: David Gilmour, Joan Armatrading, Richard Thompson, Ringo Starr, Ian Hunter and Little Feat all made at least one playlist-worthy song in 2024. I have acts that have been with me all my adult life, such as The Cure, The The, James, Robyn Hitchcock, Nick Cave, the Jesus & Mary Chain. I have acts whose names I would never have remembered had I not immediately entered them into the playlist: Warmduscher, Ganavya, Upupayama, Sassyhiya, Jahara Massambi Unit. I have ambient, electronic, experimental, leftfield, some jazz, lots of lo-fi indie rock, plenty in-your-face punk rock, some Indian music, and the occasional mainstream rock act that I begrudgingly admit merits their popularity. And while I don’t have enough African music or hip-hop in there, my list shamelessly, indeed with great pride, includes some mega pop stars of today: Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish. (Whoops, I had forgotten to include Billie Eilish. The playlist is now 207 songs long.)

I have songs with titles like “Life’s A Fucking Miracle,” “FUCK EVERYBODY” (sic) and “Fxxk Urself” and according to a quick search, a dozen that include the word “love” in the title in its traditional romantic-sexual context - plus one more, “Learning to Love A Band” by The Reds, Pinks & Purples. That act, the nom de plume for the prolific Glenn Donaldson and friends, released more than two albums’ worth of music in 2024, so much that they partly contradicted themselves by naming their September album after another song on the subject, “The World Doesn’t Need Another Band.”

In some ways, The Reds, Pinks & Purples are correct. The world doesn’t need another mediocre band. But in general, mediocrity rises to the lower half, where it belongs, and where it soon gets pushed down by the cream that rises rightly above it. And again as my playlist confirms, at least to my ears, there is plenty cream to slurp upon: the sheer growth in global population, in affordable recording software and streaming platforms dictates that not only will more mediocre music than ever continue to be made, but more good music than ever will continue to be made to rise above it.

We can not possibly hope to listen to all the cream, let alone digest it properly. We shouldn’t even try. Indeed, there is a perfectly good argument to be made for taking the opposite tack entirely. My friend Robert Warren recently wrote an excellent Substack entitled Album Therapy, in which he advocated that we regularly self-medicate our stressful modern lives by allocating uninterrupted time to immerse ourselves in a long-player, past or present. It’s a process by which, he writes,

“You transfer control to the artist’s/band’s work, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the creator(s) have painstakingly sequenced songs to evoke a particular response, like chapters in a book, or scenes in a play or film. It’s a place you go.”

I agree with Robert wholeheartedly. The album format – i.e. enough music to fit onto an old-fashioned single 12” LP, which I’d say maxes out at 45 mins - remains the perfect medium for an artist to disseminate its range of music-making and story-telling capabilities, and the ideal manner for listeners to indulge. I still do my best to abide by these rules now and then, and as such it may be no surprise that some of my personal fave albums of the year are those where I actually listened to the damned things – sorry, the painstakingly crafted little babies – in full, with undivided attention, usually on a hike or a run, occasionally on a bus ride or car ride.

But one does not discount the other. The importance of single-tasking our musical listening pleasure – of immersing ourselves in an album – is no more or less valid than rejoicing in the brief passing wealth of individual songs or composition, of merit, that cross our radars more frequently than ever.

Novelist Michael Faber’s fascinating new book Listen: On Music, Sound and Us (more about it here) makes the point that we no longer listen to music as much as we consume it, that it has become 24-hr surroundsound whereas, historically, it may have been reserved for special occasions. Assuming that he is correct, this might suggest that we could all do with taking a break from music entirely every now and then.

Believe it or not, I do so regularly. I am writing right now without music. I do almost all my writing without listening to music. I rarely listen to music in bed. We don’t listen at dinner. I prefer podcasts for my earbuds given the tinnitus. And yet my Best of 2024 playlist is still 200+ songs long and growing. There is so much out there in the ether if you want to occasionally grab at some of it.

Some of these songs will not stick with me. That’s why I started the playlist in the first place, because while I love an earworm as much as anyone, the best music can take time to sink in, and some of this best music is in the margins to begin with: I wanted to bookmark many of these songs so that at least I gave them a second listen. But equally, some of these artists may never make another good song even by other people’s subjective or objective standards.

None of that matters in the moment. My Best of 2024 is purposefully ephemeral, deliberately haphazard, willfully random. (It has also been culled. I have heard everything on it enough times to believe each song deserves its place.) The playlist was assembled in chronological order and that’s how it remains. I suggest you just put it on at random and click on the little heart button if anything you hadn’t heard before strikes you as worthy of a repeat listen. Maybe then follow

Robert Burke Warren

’s advice and listen to their album, in full, on headphones, uninterrupted. But be warned: it may be an EP, not an album. It may well also be just a “single.” Single songs are wonderful. They are what we are weaned on. They are what radio thrives upon. They are what this playlist is built upon. They are the sonic snacks of the universe.

You may be wondering as to my favorites of these 200+ favourites. That’s not how I rolled in 2024. I wasn’t asked to contribute my Top 10 this or my Top 20 that, and for all that I might have enjoyed penning a piece on Best Live Shows, Most Exciting New Indie Band, Most Surprising Comeback or indeed, perhaps Least Surprising Comeback (it’s over a decade since Matt Johnson told me to expect a triple album by The The that same year), I can only offer you a full day’s worth of individual tracks instead. I think that’s more than a fair swap.

I do, however, have an article to follow, about a form of musical presentation - not a genre, a form - that I found twisted my melon the most in 2024. Barring the unforeseen, it will drop this weekend, and it will confirm that, even as the year I turned 60 turns to the year I hope to turn 61, I remain as much a fanboy as when I first bought a David Cassidy 7” single as an eight-year old.

Can you ever have too much good music? Hell no. My Best of 2025 Playlist starts now.

1. I did, however, fail with both my career goal and my athletic goal. I am merely focusing on the positive here.

2. Hopefully this link will open up to Qobuz for you. Most of you won’t be on Qobuz, but be aware there are plenty of services that will transfer playlists from one streaming platform to another. I find Soundiiz to work efficiently. But, as much as anything, please do consider Qobuz.