When I was writing my post about connecting this blog to the Fediverse via ActivityPub, I steered myself into a time-consuming tangent trying to find out when I first started to use Facebook. Being the kind of person who perseveres even after realizing that they’re doing something in the most inefficient way possible, I ended up spending a Good Amount of Time™ infinite-scrolling down my own Facebook feed that night.

When I first started using Facebook, it looks as if I limited myself to status updates in the first two years. My first three statuses looked like this:

This appears to have been my first real Facebook post, 15 years ago:

Nothing wrong with a bit of virtue signalling to make a good first impression!

While scrolling, I noticed that many of my life updates involved music I was listening to: I shared a lot of links to YouTube and SoundCloud, and also to platforms that were really important to me: the Luisterpaal on VPRO’s music platform 3voor12, and 22Tracks. I posted them on my own feed, or on the timelines of friends.

That same night, I decided to finally figure out how Facebook’s data export feature works, and now have all my posts in a practical HTML file. No more endless scrolling: I can actually search for things now. In fact, I could even test if it provides enough material to train an AI model to write ironic, contextless one-sentence messages for me.

The music time machine: a Spotify playlist

Using that data export, I have started to compile a Spotify playlist of all the links I encountered, starting in 2009.

For today’s post, I had to stop when I reached the end of 2012. Finding the linked records and tracks is not as straightforward as it might seem: many of the links to streaming services do not work anymore. For copyright reasons (I assume), the albums that were made available on the Luisterpaal could only be streamed for a limited time; depending on the deal the broadcaster had made with the record label, album availability varied between one week and several months. The links used a number-based ID without an artist name or album name in the url, so if I didn’t provide any context in the post itself, the album I linked to remains a mystery.

YouTube videos are made available through a unique video ID which bears no relation to the video. This means that when the video is no longer available, there is no information about what used to be there. It seems unlikely that there’s a way to retrieve the title or other metadata of a video that has been taken offline – I can see that this would lead to all sorts of problems. I’ve collected them in the section called The links that got away, on the off chance that there is a way to figure out if I’d been linking to a song in any of them.

You can find the first part of the playlist here, with 24 songs (or songs from albums, or songs from artists whose concerts) I shared from the beginning of 2009 until the end of 2012:

Songs that are not on Spotify or simply have a wonderful (working!) video that’s worth listing as well

Some of the songs I linked to aren’t available on Spotify, and in other cases, I linked to a video that is simply too nice not to share:

• Dirty Projectors – Stillness Is The Move
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPF6lpM0XM
  2009
• wait what – Notorious xx https://waitwhat.bandcamp.com/album/the-notorious-xx
  2010
• Bart B More November 2010 Asia/Australia Tour
  https://soundcloud.com/bart-b-more/bart-b-more-november-2010-asia-australia-tour-mixtape
  2010
• Rixt Leddy en Laurens Joensen – Dans me
  Featuring my sister on saxophone!
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOZLiQg6p7c
  2011
• Rue Royale – live@mailmen.nl
  https://mailmen.bandcamp.com/album/white-winter-hymnal-live-mailmen-nl
  2011
• WAVEZERO / EARTH
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyp1BC0ndww
  2011
• The Maccabees – Pelican
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcp8SE_FxBg
  2011
• Eric Whitacre – Cloudburst
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zqp0OpzMAI
  Shared in 2012
• Maps & Atlases – Remote and Dark Years
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-d6pelv2eA
  2012
• Alt-J (∆) – Taro
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3fTw_D3l10
  2012

The ones that got away

Some of these Youtube links might not even have been music?

1. http://3voor12.vpro.nl/speler/luisterpaal/43355908 (April 2010)
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeOIiJhNYXE (April 2010)
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUy-KS3v0FI (August 2010, something about cold fingers and toes in summer)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSlY74J6iH8 (October 2011, “Do we obsess over these things?”)
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQUuk_cGsUs (December 2012)
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jdwun7T47o (March 2013, Omar’s birthday)

That’s it for this post.

Update: I have just published part 2 of this post. In it, I describe how I found out that my archive was not chronologically ordered at all, and how I used a little bit of AI to sort that out.