Formalizing RELISTENS (aka Formalizing EDITS take two)

Let’s try this again, shall we?

I started formally keeping track of my edits, my EDITS, a while back, and that was great, that was the right call. It was so much the right call, in fact, that I realized I needed to be even more formal and procedural with my editing process. I realized and implemented this almost immediately, but I haven’t yet made this additional change very visible from the outside. And I should; it’s a pretty significant change.

Basically, I made it a rule for myself that I could only make any edits and adjustments if I first relistened through the entire discography of the artist again. My rankings have to be based off of listening, not hazily incomplete memory. My relistens aren’t quite as formal or consistent as my main listening— I’m genuinely, absurdly consistent with my main listening. I don’t think I’ve missed a day in years for literally any reason. An album a day, twice through, every day. My relistens aren’t like that. Since I made this new rule for myself, they’ve been more consistent— I do my relistens most days, but not every day, and not the same amount every time I do it. Most days, though, it’s pretty much the same. After my main listening, I listen to the next two albums of my current relisten (only once through each, as opposed to my usual two).

So when I talk about relistening to an artist, when I say that something is a RELISTEN, I’m talking about an additional listen of somebody’s entire discography in order, with the specific intention of reevaluating how I feel about them. This doesn’t include all the times I’ve continued to listen through artists purely for enjoyments sake, or when I did full additional listens of artists without specifically taking note of it and turning it into a “relisten”— a relisten is a specific event with specific premeditated intent (otherwise I’d be trying to track waaaayyyyy more than I can handle). I’ve gone through and retroactively adjusted my posts to reflect the difference between EDITS and RELISTENS clearly, but what you’ll see is that there are still things that are marked as EDITS. Those EDITS are edits I made before I made this new rule for myself, before I was quite so deliberate with it. Some early EDITS I was able to change to RELISTENS because I have written record or distinct memory of doing a full and intentional relisten, but if there was any uncertainty at all I marked it as an EDIT.

To review and conclude: if it says RELISTEN, it means I know with a certainty that that edit was made after doing a full relisten of the artist. The format is: RELISTEN# (direction). So, RELISTEN3 (up) would mean it was my third relisten of the artist and they moved up a rank (ie, from B to B+, or from C+ to A). If it says “(small up)”, that means it moved up within the same rank (ie, from B+ to a higher B+). EDITS (that is, edits without full relistens) are an artifact of a more chaotic age, and they won’t happen again barring exceptional circumstances.