Hari Sekhon - Spotify Playlists

git.io/spotify-playlists

The Greatest Playlists Collection of anybody I know of in the world.

Point me to a better public one if you can! 🙏🏼

Built over 15+ years of scouring Spotify and writing dozens of programs using its API to track and manage my playlists to a high standard.

I'm always looking for new songs so if you know a great track that isn't in one of these playlists, open an issue for me to add it!

Top level playlists are in human readable format Artist - Track.

Spotify URI format playlists are under the spotify/ directory for easy backup / restore, analysis or copying to new playlists.

See HariSekhon/Knowledge-Base Spotify page for tools and tips around the playlist management, backups, playlist migrations, Spotify API tools I've written and 3rd party tools.

Hari Sekhon

(you're welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn)

• Quick Guide
• Best of the Best
  • Favourites
  • Pop, Dance, Trance, House
  • Hip-Hop & R&B
  • Rock
  • Workout & Defiance
  • Love, Sex & Modern 304 Life
  • Chill, Instrumentals, Acoustic, Other
  • Classics of Past Decades, Jazz, Classical, Motown & Soul
  • Best of Decades
  • Best by Year
    • Shocking Revelations & Analytics
  • Ethnic Playlists
  • Artists
    • Best Artist Playlists
• The Tech Stuff

Quick Guide

• Genre mega mixes (eg. Pop / Dance, Hip-Hop / R&B, Rock / Metal, Electronica, Classical, Motown / Soul, Classics, Club, Disco! etc)
• Best <Genre> / Elite ... / <special name> - shorter highest quality playlists (these are the ones you really want, listed below)
• Artist specific playlists
• Mixes in Time - YYYY MM - <description> date stamped mixes - stuff that was either hot at that time or that I discovered and listened to more at that time

Best of the Best

Favourites

• Favourites 💯 😎 - absolute favs across all genres. If you only ever had one playlist in your life, this is it!
  • Elite Favourites 💯😎 - the Best of the Best across all genres, a more elite subset of the Favourites playlist

Pop, Dance, Trance, House

These first few are among my all time all genre favourite playlists:

• Best Pop 🥳 🎉
• Upbeat & Sexual Pop 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 🍑 💦 - the ultimate driving upbeat pop mega mix for road trips with your girlfriend
• Hot Love 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 🍑 💦 - Pop-Dance based, for your hot girlfriend current or future
• Best Female Vocal Trance, Dance & Deep House ❤️ 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 😍 🍑 💦 - the sound of hot white girls singing. See also the Hot Love playlist above
• Best Trance, Dance & Deep House 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 🥳 🎉 - best tunes and vocals, hot white chick music
• Club Bangers! 🥳 🎉 - club music - upbeat dance, house, trance etc.

• Pop Mega-Mix 🥳 🎉
• Pop Mega-Mix 2 🥳 🎉 - overspill because Spotify limits playlists to 10,000 tracks. The first Pop Mega-Mix playlist is better since it sucked up most of the best known popular songs first
• Love Island Mega-Mix 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 😍 🍑 💦 - music from the hit TV show's many seasons - generally Pop-Dance with some R&B and Hip-Hop mixed in

• Disco! 🕺💃 - inspired by the 70s onwards...
• Karaoke Classics 🎤 🥳 🎉
• Electronica ⚡️ 💿
• Soft Pop🍦 🍦 - soft pop songs that you can listen to late night while the kids are asleep in the back of the car...

Hip-Hop & R&B

• Best Hip-Hop 😎 - both Classic & New - superset of Elite Hip-Hop with Attitude and Smooth Hip-Hop playlists
• Best R&B 😎

• Smooth Hip-Hop 😎 - legendary smooth hip-hop to play while driving your drug dealer car
• Elite Hip-Hop with Attitude 😎 - legendary elite hip-hop with attitude to play while driving your drug dealer car
  • Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It 😎 - subset of Elite Hip-Hop with Attitude and a few Smooth Hip-Hop tracks
• Hip-Hop - Bounce to the Rhythm 😎 - Beats & Bounce. "Break Ya Neck bitches"... as Busta Rhymes would say...
• Grime - UK Hip-Hop 🇬🇧 😎 - British street hip-hop
• Hip-Hop & R&B Mega-Mix 😎
• Smooth 😎
• R&B 😎
• Jamaican - Reggae - Riddim 🇯🇲 🇯🇲 - inspired by a half-Jamaican girl I used to know...

Rock

• Best Rock 🤘 🎸
• Rock Mega-Mix 🤘 🎸
• Elite Percussive Rock & Electro Blues 🤘 🎸
• Redneck Rock 🇺🇸 🤘 🎸 🇺🇸 - 🇺🇸 God Bless America 🇺🇸 - never leave home without your 9 or 45...
• Nu Metal 🤘 🎸
• College Rock 🤘 🎸
• Guitar Rock 🤘 🎸

Workout & Defiance

• Best Workout Pop 💪 🏃🏃‍♀️ - best of the bigger Workout Pop 💪 🏃🏃‍♀️ gym mega mix - Energetic Pop, Dance, Trance, Drum n Bass, Beats
• Best Workout Hip-Hop (Aggressive) 💪 😎 - the best workout hip-hop, gym hardcore for guys pumping iron and hitting bags
• Rocky 🥊
• MMA, UFC & Boxing 🥊 - music from the legends of Mixed Martial Arts such as UFC / PrideFC walkout songs or event previews
• Workout Pop 💪 🏃🏃‍♀️
• Defiance - Beat the Odds in Life 💪 🚀 - working out or on your economic grind, there is no more respectable man than he who rises from nothing to something through his own hard work and merit. When people wonder how I beat the odds in life or why I get more ripped the older I get:
  • "No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable" ― Socrates

Love, Sex & Modern 304 Life

• Love Songs ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ - romantic love songs for your sweetie... they don't make them like this any more!
• Sensual 🍑 💦 - for a nice evening in with the girlfriend, massage & more
• Songs About Sex 🍑 💦 - for single guys with high testosterone on their way to mischief, hip-hop based
• Bad Boy Gets Down 🍑 💦 😎 - for those late night bad boy journeys... hip-hop based
• Baditude - Bad Bitches with Attitude ❤️ 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 😍 ❤️ - you’d let her ruin your life because she’s hot… this is how we end up with beautiful babies
• Stripper Music 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 🍑 💦 - Pop & Hip-Hop based - because who doesn't love a 304...
• These Hoes Ain’t Loyal 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 🍑💦 - Hip-hop based cos they know what’s up, with modern Pop mixed in… a sign of the times that there are this many songs in this playlist...
• Heartbroken 💔 💔 - one of my greatest & deepest playlists. Everyone has that one person in life that messes them up for a long time... these artists clearly felt it too...
  • Heart Breakers 💔 💔 💔 - a playlist of heartbreaker songs that even those who haven't had their heart broken can appreciate

Chill, Instrumentals, Acoustic, Other

• Chill 😎 - chill & pop tunes for work and life
• Light Fun Feel Good 🥳 🎉 - because sometimes you need to lighten up
• Best Tunes & Instrumentals 🎹 - instrumentals and songs mostly for the tune... drug dealer car
• Piano 🎹
• Acoustic 🎤 🎤
• Karaoke Classics 🎤 🥳 🎉
• My Shazam Tracks

Classics of Past Decades, Jazz, Classical, Motown & Soul

• Classics - Hits from Decades Gone By 🎩 🏛️ - mid to late 20th century classics and well known songs

• Coffee Shops Mega-Mix ☕️ 🎷 - Easy Listening, Jazz, Lounge, Soft Pop... stuff you'd hear at Coffee Shops

• Best Motown & Soul 👻 - excellent tracks you wish you knew earlier, much of the best contemporary hip-hop tunes are "borrowed" from these Motown classics
• Motown & Soul 👻

• Classical 🎻 🎹

Best of Decades

• The 2020s - Hits from the 2020s - mix of Pop-Dance, Rock, R&B & Hip-Hop
• The 2010s - the decade of the Tinder Dating Apocalypse... at least there is good music to enjoy in the decline!!
• The 2000s - Hits from the 2000s - mix of Pop-Dance, Rock, R&B & Hip-Hop
• The 90s - The Decade of Dance, R&B 🇺🇸 & Brit Pop! 🇬🇧 🥳 🎉 - re-live the Best of the 90s - with lots of Dance, R&B and BritPop from the UK’s last golden age. See also the Brit Pop playlist below
• The 80s - The Greatest Decade in Human History! 👩🏻‍🦰 👩🏼 👩🏻 😎 🥳 🎉 - the 80s was the greatest decade in human history - upbeat, iconic, beautiful - any songs in a positive 80s style are also welcome here
• The 70s - The Decade of Disco & Classics! 💃 🕺 😎 🥳 🎉 - the Best of the 1970s - including Queen, Blondie, Bill Conti, Fleetwood Mac ...
• Brit Pop 🇬🇧 🇬🇧 🇬🇧 - re-live the golden 90s indie bands like The Verve, Oasis, Pulp, Blur, Skunk Anansie, Texas and Ocean Colour Scene plus newer acts like Lily Allen, Blossom, Micky James

Best by Year

Here are the best tracks by year:

• 2020 • 2021 • 2022 • 2023 • 2024 • 2025 • 2026

• 2010 • 2011 • 2012 • 2013 • 2014 • 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019

• 2000 • 2001 • 2002 • 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009

• 1990 • 1991 • 1992 • 1993 • 1994 • 1995 • 1996 • 1997 • 1998 • 1999

• 1980 • 1981 • 1982 • 1983 • 1984 • 1985 • 1986 • 1987 • 1988 • 1989

• 1970 • 1971 • 1972 • 1973 • 1974 • 1975 • 1976 • 1977 • 1978 • 1979

• 1964 • 1965 • 1966 • 1967 • 1968 • 1969

Shocking Revelations & Analytics

When compiling these playlists, I was shocked at the disparity in number of songs worthy of each year group.

Here is a graph of each year playlist number of tracks (run through my track name normalization code to deduplicate different versions of the same track to only count them once).

No this graph is not cumulative, it is per individual year in isolation:

Conclusions:

1. I cannot say that "Music is actually getting better" from a classical musician standpoint...
2. We all know there are some all-time legendary songs that have ingrained themselves in our childhoods, movies & culture...
3. We may or may not have some personal bias towards older legendary tracks due to replay bias building our connection to the older songs

but what I can say with some confidence is...

4. There are more good songs across genres overall in recent years than there were in earlier years - this is clearly shown in the graph of tracks above which is scraped from all my major playlists, genres and decades
5. Of course the golden age of Hip-Hop & R&B has passed... this is well known
6. There were some god awful number 1 songs in the 1990s that would never have been even played today given the higher competition...
7. The competition was definitely thinner the further back in years you go - artists could afford to be less competitive and still get to the top
8. Today that fantastic song you don't even remember the artist before moving on to the next song in the 100M+ song catalog
9. We are drowning in more music than ever
10. This gives us the bias that music today is too samey - really this is a music spam & filtering problem, which I have largely solved in this repo using extensive obsessive amounts of time and code as well as my general overall music fan coolness 😎 😉
11. Even my beloved 1980s cannot compete with the sheer volume of good songs available today
12. Even if I wish they still made more music like the 80s, it's actually better to reach the 90s to collect the entire 80s music collection - vs if I went back to the mid 80s I'd be missing roughly half of it

Ethnic Playlists

• Latin American 🇧🇷 🇲🇽 🇦🇷 🇨🇴 🇻🇪
• European 🇪🇺 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇵🇱 🇨🇿 🇸🇰 🇺🇦 🇷🇺 - European music - mainly French, German and Slavic - superset of those adjacent playlists
  • French 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🥐 🥐 - French language / accent songs
  • Slavic 🇵🇱 🇨🇿 🇸🇰 🇺🇦 🇷🇺 - not just the hottest women in the world, but they have some good music too, I love the sound of some of these... it's ok to be biased in favour of Slavic 😉
  • German 🇩🇪 🇩🇪
• Indian 🇮🇳 🇮🇳 - Indian music has its moments, especially that classic from Punjabi MC
• Greek 🇬🇷 🇬🇷 🇨🇾 🇨🇾
• K-Pop 🇰🇷 🇰🇷 - Korean pop music

Artists

Even my followed artists are backed up to artists_followed.txt and can be restored via my spotify scripts.

Artists with 5 or more tracks in my Liked Songs are automatically followed by my spotify scripts.

Best Artist Playlists

Far from a complete list - artists whose body of work is consistently high quality enough for its own playlist.

There are a lot of artist playlists in my libary but some need more culling of songs... time is always the issue.

• Jay-Z
• Nas
• The Notorious B.I.G.
• 2Pac
• Bon Jovi – Bon Jovi Greatest Hits - The Ultimate Collection
• Guns N' Roses
• Ellie Goulding
• Florence + The Machine
• The Weeknd
• DMX – The Best Of DMX
• Lil Wayne
• Devlin
• Foo Fighters
• Chromeo
• M83 Condensed
• Lily Allen
• Rita Ora - ORA Deluxe
• Beyoncé
• Rihanna
• Kylie Minogue - Best of
• Robyn
• Simply Red – The Greatest Hits 25
• Placebo
• P!nk
• Fickle Friends – You Are Someone Else
• Linkin Park
• The xx
• Kings Of Leon
• Blackmill
• Ludovico Einaudi - Favourites

The Tech Stuff

These playlists are downloaded and managed by scripts in the DevOps Bash tools and Spotify tools repos which are available as submodules under the bash-tools/ and spotify-tools/ directories respectively.

Aside from Backup & Restore, keeping all playlists in both Spotify and human readable formats allows all sorts of handy tricks, eg:

• grep'ing your entire playlist catalog (which you can't do in Spotify's App)
• auto-removing duplicates from a given playlist (detected via URI and/or human readable name - different levels of duplicate detection)
• auto-removing tracks from todo playlists that are already in one of the core playlists so you don't have to check those tracks ever again (when combined with blacklist playlists this is a huge progressive efficiency gain)
• setting all of the tracks in your favourite playlists to Liked Songs without a zillion clicks in Spotify (useful to port over your Starred tracks)
• bulk-loading tracks from one or more playlists or even favourites from Liked Songs

git.io/spotify-playlists

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