Why Rate Songs Using Automation?

Given my last two posts, you may be asking why the hell would someone even want to automate something as simple as rating songs. I have three reasons. First, I can’t judge a song on first listen. My enjoyment of a given song develops and changes over time. Second, I am not an active music listener which is to say I mostly listen to music while am doing something else. Finally, rating songs in Music is both extremely tedious and incredibly disruptive. The last thing I want to do when listening to Music while working is…

  1. Stop what I am doing
  2. Switch to Music
  3. Find the currently playing song
  4. Try to click a 10-by-10 point star to rate that song
  5. Go back to what I am doing

Those are the steps involved to rate the currently playing song using the Mac version of the Music app, and the iOS version is even worse. You can use Siri to rate songs, but it annoyingly interrupts music to tell you what a good job it’s done. In order to continuously rate my music without disruption, the mechanism needs to be frictionless. Automation in this case simply allows me to remove the friction.