So as I said yesterday, I've finally completed my 2024 Asian Music top 20 lists. There are a lot more lists than last year, so here's the link to the Excel workbook that has everything as well as links to the relevant playlists. As previously, I shall be listing the 2024 monthly and Top 3 playlists at the bottom of this post, as I'm deleting them from the sidebar to make way for this year's ones.
Using a single playlist each month was a good change last year and made the process much easier to keep track of, so I'm doing it again this year. I am also trying to take a bit more time to flag up the entries that I really love in an attempt to make it quicker for year-end, and also so I don't have to play through something like 3,000 songs on top of those in the January and February playlists, trying to sort out my lists.
This is already paying dividends as I sorted out all my January picks within a couple of days of the end of the month rather than a month or longer, even while I was still trying to sort the 2024 music. As long as I have time to keep my records up to date, it should be really helpful.
As a reminder, all releases are based on Spotify categorisation. I may think a 9-track release is an album, but if Spotify/the artist list it as an EP (or worse still as a single 😭) I have no choice but to accept it, as heartbreaking as that can be sometimes when tough choices have to be made at the end of the month.
I have also put all collaborations (and those with featuring artists) under the group category, and as always, these lists only relate to male artists as I rarely listen to female ones.
There are no OSTs this year as I'd lost the will to listen to the 200+ songs in that list by the time I'd finished the rest, and none stood out as obvious contenders. I may do them later, but it's unlikely.
One year I will manage to do top 20 lists that actually contain only 20 songs, but this year is not that year 😂 - although I did do better than last year.
So let's get into the details:
OVERALL STATS
According to Spotify, I listened to 98,072 minutes of music, an increase from 2023 of 28,731 minutes. Last.fm tells me that this equals 31,813 songs (an average of 86 songs a day). That's 3,167 different artists, with 7,268 unique releases.
TOP FIVE ARTISTS
These songs are, IMO, the best of the best in 2024.
ALBUMS
TOP 20 ASIAN ALBUMS (SOLOISTS)
TOP 20 ASIAN SINGLES (OVERALL)
TOP 20 ASIAN SINGLES (SOLOISTS)
There are also individual playlists for the top 20 Albums, EPs and Singles in each separate language, but I'm not going to list them here as this post will be long enough already. You can find them on the relevant tabs in the workbook if you're interested.
A & B SIDES
TOP 20 ASIAN A-SIDES (ALBUMS) (SOLOISTS)
TOP 20 ASIAN B-SIDES (ALBUMS) (SOLOISTS)
TOP 20 ASIAN A-SIDES (EPs) (BANDS)
This is a playlist of all the bands (that I know of) who debuted in 2024 (48 of them) and their debut track as they all deserve their moment of glory. They are listed in favourite order.
A lot of idols from well-established bands had their solo debuts in 2024. It seemed unfair to rank them against previously unknown debut soloists so I created two separate lists.
These are my favourite collaborations that happened this year.
As most covers don't get put on Spotify (sadly), this is a YouTube playlist.This is another YouTube playlist (obviously).
AND FINALLY
These are my top 3 albums, EPs and Singles for 2024 sorted by month. They are listed by language as follows: Chinese, English, Korean, Japanese (by non-Japanese artists), Japanese and Other, which covers all other Asian languages.
Each month, I somehow get the full list of singles down to 8 (in each language), from which I then have to choose the top 3. It really is extremely tough, which is why this year I'm trying to mark up the songs I enjoy the most to make this process easier. This list contains the 8 singles from each month that I considered for the top 3 because I couldn't bear to lose any of them.
This is a playlist of the songs the Receiptify app tells me are my top 10 most listened-to songs of the month. For 2024 I decided to add all 10 each month regardless of whether they had been on the list before or not. There were actually only 60 unique songs in the playlist last year as I spent a lot of time listening to certain playlists, which meant the same songs were in the top 10 each month.
These were my 10 favourite songs from the best song contest in the world 🏳️🌈.
MONTHLY ASIAN MUSIC PLAYLISTS
These are the monthly playlists. I do remove instrumental tracks as my time is short enough already without having to trawl through them too. If the whole EP or album is instrumental I will have listened to enough of each track to count as listening to it. Fortunately, these don't happen often.
I'm not sure how interesting it would be to others, but posting here for completeness. It does show what I actually listened to most over the year, which isn't always what is shown in any of the other lists.
