New music release day today – by 7am I have added 1,755 songs for review, and that’s after removing the Classical, Country, Christian, Jazz, R&B. People don’t believe I do this, but it’s true. All year, sifting through new releases from Apple Music. The technique:

Add new releases to library by genre: Alternative, Indie, Reggae, Rock, World, Metal.
Add new releases from front page.
Three smart playlists make the rest of the process more manageable – all limited to songs added in 2017… 0 stars, 2 stars, 4+ stars.
Start listening – quickly weeding out the bands that don’t connect with what I like. These tracks are assigned a 1 star rating, and are gone.
Anything that sounds promising at all gets 2 stars. It usually takes about a 30-60 minutes to sift through the week’s releases and make this initial sort.
Now I have a week to listen to the 2 star playlist and anything good in there moves up to 4 stars for regular rotation. Anything that doesn’t connect goes to 1 star and out.
Songs that get 4 stars initially are reduced to 3 stars if they don’t hold up, and others move up to 5 stars if I really like them.
After doing this all year I’ve got 482 songs in regular rotation. Last year? only 163.

If you read all of that, sorry.