If you’re like me, you have a huge collection of music but you end up listening to the Same Old Stuff all the time.

To challenge myself to discover new music, I decided to play a game. The rules:

THE RULES:

1. Once you play a song, it is added to the List.
2. You may not play that song, or any song on the List, again until 100 days from when you started playing The Game.
3. If you hear a song through a radio station, like Pandora, that’s on the List, you must skip or mute it.
4. Exceptions:
   1. If you are exposed to a song (a) being used as a soundtrack, (b) in concert, (c) or through any method where you aren’t directly controlling the playlist (other people’s radios, restaurants, etc.), it does not count as you playing it.
   2. If you are a performer, and you are mainly listening to a song to rehearse, it does not count.
   3. Covers of the same piece count separately.
   4. Different versions (live/acoustic) of the same piece count separately, as long as they are substantially different (i.e. not the same band playing in a different venue)
   5. For classical music, different performers count separately.
   6. If you feel like you are cheating, add a new rule that stops you from doing whatever it is that felt like cheating.
   7. If you accidentally listen to a song that you’ve heard before, it’s a point. Score is like golf. Lower is better.

By the end of this, I will hopefully have listened to a lot of music, and quite a bit of it will be new. I’ll post my thoughts on this blog.