Back in August I created a Spotify playlist called “Best of 2012.” Since then I’ve done a lot of tweaking and refining to it. Things got a little out of hand.
At this point the list is as close to exactly how I want it as it’s going to get. Spotify’s library has a lot of pretty huge gaps. There aren’t a lot of mixtapes on it, so I couldn’t include anything from either of Action Bronson’s extremely rewarding album-length releases of the year, or Charli XCX’s “Forgiveness”, and I had to put Jeremih’s “773 Love” on there instead of the superior “Fuck U All the Time” because that’s the only song from his amazing Late Nights with Jeremih mixtape that Spotify has. And, increasingly, the best hip-hop and dance music is being released straight to the Internet track by track without coming anywhere near an actual record label, so the mind-blowing amount of good music that came out via SoundCloud this year is almost entirely absent. But all in all I think it’s a fair representation of my listening this year.