2025: The Music Playlist ⭐

YouTube Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and other music streaming services released their end-of-year recaps in December, and it's always interesting for music lovers to look back and see which songs, albums, artists, and genres rose to the top. Interesting ... and sometimes not as expected.

In my case, 2025 was a curious year for music, as it was skewed dramatically by a few unplanned forays into older music and me dividing my time between YouTube Music and Apple Music. I still prefer YouTube Music overall, but both have unique qualities I like. For example, YouTube Music lets you add individual YouTube videos as music tracks to playlists, which I love. And Apple Music is interesting for its spatial audio and lossless capabilities, plus it obviously works well with Apple mobile devices, Macs, and AirPods.

As for the music itself, I think it's well understood that it gets more difficult to find new music as you get older. I've tried to buck this trend by finding new music in bars, restaurants, and even Uber rides and secreting them away using Shazam or the built-in music discovery feature built into Pixel phones. And in 2025, I did add dozens of new songs--music that was either literally new or at least new to us--to my playlists.

For this reason, I feel like I’m probably better at this than most people my age. But looking over the releases I listened to the most this year, it's nostalgia that stands out the most. Three of my favorite albums from 2025 are either live recordings from legacy rock bands or anthologies. They are:

The Residency: Sammy Hagar & The Best of All Worlds Band. When Hagar released the single "Encore, Thank You, Goodnight," I cringed, waiting for the horrible reaction from whatever is left of Van Halen these days. But everyone in the Halen camp loved the song and saw the respect he was communicating. Listening to this song live, and the nearly note-perfect renditions of Hagar-era Halen classics like "5150," "Top of the World," "Humans Being," and "When It's Love," hit me harder than I'd expected. This was easily my most-played album of the year, and I have put select tracks, including those noted above, into regular rotation. Hagar's voice is still incredible, and this band is terrific. I did not expect this.
Diamond Star Heroes Live from Sheffield: Def Leppard. I have a lot less to say here, other than Def Leppard is probably my favorite live rock band of all time, which is incredible given the production values of their biggest albums. And while it has released other excellent live albums over the years, this one is appreciated mostly for just including some of the newer songs. This is a band that has never stopped making music, and I love songs on all of their albums, including the most recent. I have a Def Leppard Live playlist and have to see whether it makes sense to replace any of the live songs there with the newer versions.
Anthology 4: The Beatles. I have even less to say about the Beatles...