2022 Repeat

The end of 2022 is inbound, so it's time to recap the past year. And a fair warning: This will be more extensive than what you usually get at Weekly5.

Statistics

First, let's take a look at the numbers. The raw data shows 35 editions which equals 175 songs. Two artists (benzii and the Editors) were featured three times, while eight more had two separate entries. In the end, it amounts to 153 different featured artists.

Also, I'm pretty proud of: Out of these 153 artists, 87 have female, trans, or non-binary members—57% of featured artists.

And, as a bit of musical patriotism: 50 artists are based in Switzerland.

Diving deeper using a playlist analyser tool, some interesting statistics arise. For example, I was quite surprised that rock, indie-rock especially, still was the dominating genre in the 2022 curation cycle. I felt that it was way more electronically dominated. The rise of electronic elements in rock music may explain this feeling.

Quite hard to comprehend are the statistics around the playlist moods. This is because they're based on Spotify's music categorisation. However, I'm proud of the low rating in popularity, which means that I managed to find fresh and unknown tunes over the year.

Repeat 2022: An Explanation

After 35 editions, I also set out to choose some of the most compelling. Here's a short explainer of how I went about it.

As explained last year, I'm not a massive fan of best-ofs. Yes, they might provide some valuable overviews about what to discover. However, these best-ofs are also a dusty relict of outdated music journalism that lost all its relevance in the age of digital music consumption.

Moreover, our perception of music is highly subjective—as any art, in fact. I still like most of the songs I've recommended over the past months, but whether I enjoy them depends on my mood.

With that said, I've tried different approaches to recap this year's editions. For example, I again went through every edition and chose only one track. Then, of course, I also played the number game and selected the songs I listened to the most.

However, there are glaring downsides to these approaches, the biggest one being that it doesn't reflect the diversity of Weekly5. Therefore, I once again chose the best yet most complex way to create a reflective recap of 2022.

Five different categories represent a mixture of mood and style. Each category contains ten songs providing a taste and an opportunity for you to rediscover the tracks. Each track is linked to the original edition, where you find my description. At the end of the post are links to the playlists on Spotify and Apple Music.

You can rediscover all the songs as well in the playlists on Spotify and Apple Music.