What is Choose My Music?


For some reason I get my best ideas when I am in the shower. I am not yet sure if the opportunity to be alone with my thoughts is the key to creative thinking. Or whether it is simply because there really isn't much else to think about, other than how our bathroom might need re-tiling soon.

Either way, that is how Choose My Music came to be.

Initially there wasn't even a website. It was just me and my followers on Twitter.

The rules were, and still are quite simple:

  1. My CD rack has 9 bays (labelled A-I). Each bay has 2 rows (labelled A-B) and each row has 34 CDs (1-34)
  2. At a random time, on a random day I will put a request out on Twitter for someone to Choose My Music
  3. Whoever responds to the request first gets to choose what CD I listen to.

Additional to this I have my own enforced rules to stop me cheating...quite who I would be cheating is unclear, but I felt they were needed anyway.

  1. I will listen to whatever is picked by the first person to respond to my request, no matter how bad the CD
  2. I will only look at what CD the first response corresponds to. This stops me being tempted to pick the 3rd, 5th or 20th response if it is better than the 1st
  3. No repeats. If someone picks something that has already been chosen I go to the 2nd response.

And that is about it. It wasn't until March this year when I decided to set up a site following redundancy. Rather unfortunately the first CD ever picked to feature on the site was a terrible Sex Pistols album comprised of barely audible live tracks and poor quality demos. But that is the beauty of it. The uncertainty is rather exciting and often leads me to rediscover long forgotten albums

Like most people, a lot of my music can be attributed to a particular point in time, a certain memory or just a slurry of useless information and this is what makes up the majority of my write ups.

There is also a second aspect of Choose My Music called 'Audiophiles'. Every week I try, in the true spirit of 6 Music, to directed the readers to an artist or band I have discovered recently.

If you want to Choose My Music, or if you have a band to suggest for Audiophiles then feel free to follow me on Twitter. You can find me here