My Favorite Tracks of 2010
Friday, December 31st, 2010As 2010 draws to a close, it’s fun to reflect on all of the awesome music that I discovered this year.. 2010 was a banner year for me, musically — my work life and music life merged for a bit with two awesome music conferences, kicking off with MIDEM in Cannes and then SXSW in Austin. My XM Radio went on the fritz about halfway through the year, so while XMU 43 was a great source of new music finds in the beginning of the year, I challenged myself to discover music in other ways for the latter part of 2010.
What I found was that while there’s definitely a lot of great online music discovery tools out there (Hype Machine, 8tracks, and thesixtyone are my favorites), there’s nothing that I found that I could just trust passive music discovery to, like I did with XMU. Pandora has potential, but so far, I find the suggestions that it makes to be kind of meh… It’s ok, when you’re in the mood to hear a particular style of stuff, but as far as pushing the envelope of what you’ve heard before, it, by design, is bad at that.
Ok, enough rambling… on to the music.
According to last.fm, my top 10 artists for 2010 are:
- Fanfarlo
- Das Racist
- Aziz Ansari
- Sia
- Lily Allen
- Ratatat
- RJD2
- She & Him
- Sleigh Bells
- The Melodians
Hmm.. Interesting. Fanfarlo was a clear favorite, with their show at SXSW being one of my top 3 there. Clearly, I listened to Aziz Ansari’s new album a lot. And that’s kind of neat to see The Melodians sneak in there at #10 — a sign that I still listen to ska once in awhile.
Ok.. on to my favorite tracks for 2010… To be clear, this is music that *I’ve* added to my library in 2010 — so, there may be a few tunes in here that weren’t technically released in 2010, but I don’t care, since, they were new to me. 2010 was a great music year. Out of the 1,042 tracks I added to my library this year, these are my favorite 22.
For this year’s list, I’m trying out something a little different… as usual, I’m posting it on 8tracks:
But also, I’ve made a list on YouTube as well, from what I can find:
There are three key differences between the 8tracks and YouTube versions.. First off, I replaced Sleigh Bells’ “Crown On The Ground” with “Infinity Guitars” because CotG doesn’t yet have a video, and with that in mind, having the actual video means that IG wins out slightly. For track #17, my favorite track is Doctor Rosen Rosen’s remix of Natalia Kills’ Mirrors, but that track isn’t on YouTube yet, so I just used the Natalia Kills original track, which has a nice video. And.. the third main difference is that for many of the “official” videos, you’ll be blessed with some ads. Wonderful.
Hope you had a great 2010 too! Here’s to a great 2011!
