Ambient Playlist Blog: Holiday Season 2025

Welcome to the Holiday Season 2025! Another year has passed, much faster than any other ever before. There were many ups and downs and calm moments inbetween, and now we've almost finally reached the end of the fifth year of the 'Ambient Playlist Blog' being your place to discover atmospheric music playlists!

By the end of last year I would never have expected to run through 2025 that smoothly, keeping the post scedule up throughout the entire year with so many new playlists to present. At some point they even started to pile up so much that I could have filled the slots for yet another month and still have some playlists left. I decided to keep posting consistently though, with three playlists a week, to not run out of playlists to post again at some point, not devalue the curators' efforts by just shoving their lists out all at once, and to not run low on my own energy trying to keep this whole thing up.

The statement I made about a year ago still stands.
(Read the blog entry here: https://ambient-playlist-blog.blogspot.com/2024/12/4th-ambient-playlist-blog-anniversary.html)
The ongoing "premiumification" of playlist pitching pages put the handbrake on effectively reaching out to curators, even more so with additionally implemented limitations of receiving even fewer free credits per week in order to push the premium models, and it still takes a lot of time and effort for artists to get heard, if they refuse to throw money at the task because they can't or simply don't want to. The 'Ambient Playlist Blog' always has been endorsing direct, community-based and cost free ways for artists to reach out to playlist curators and will keep up the values of simple, free and real connections between artists, curators and listeners to make it possible for everyone to participate in the Ambient music community.

My respect for the playlist curators, who are putting their time and effort into creating what others can enjoy, has quatrodouzently increased during the last few months. During the second half of this year I stepped into the shoes of being an "official" curator myself and it's absolutely wild how much time and energy it takes to stand in the constant barrage of submissions (many of them not even remotely on the topic and mood of the playlist they are aimed for) and digging through multiple piles of hours of music, while everything else - my own music project 'Imagine The Sea', my own dreams and goals, literally my own life! - gets shoved aside in order to somehow, anyhow, get a hold of the massive never ending submissions coming in, while trying not to feel the additional pressure of the page provider's "don't forget to manage your open submissions" messages after I come home from a 40h work week. Mad respect to all curators who do this day after day, week after week, for years!

And now about the elephant in the room: While the 'Ambient Playlist Blog' is posting mainly only Spotify playlists, it was never meant to be exclusively a collection of Spotify playlists in the first place (even if it still says so in the page header) - it just happens that most people are only curating playlists on Spotify and that's also where listeners tend to search for new music when it comes to listening to playlists of individual tracks and not to hour long mix tracks, like on YouTube. Recently I've added some playlists though which are curated on different streaming platforms (you can find them under the tag "multi platform"), which include playlists on Deezer, Soundcloud, and YouTube for now.
I have the feeling that 2026 will be the year, when the future of music streaming will take a shift. People are already looking for alternatives, and while Spotify will still stay the biggest provider, especially the niche genres will be the first to transit to other platforms as their main pillar. What this main pillar will be, is all about which platform provides the best ways of creating and listening to playlists. It has always been about playlists - it's why Spotify became so big and it's why Bandcamp is good but was never really perfect (oh, not getting started about Bandcamp and their yet-to-come full decline here, after they are changing the payout provider and artists start jumping off).

If there's a way to make things work, someone will find it.
If there's a way to make things worse, someone will find it.
If there's a way to break things to make them work better, someone will find it.

We're at the crossroads to decide for ourselves which path to take.

But there's also time for celebrations and having a good time: To bring you some relaxing music during the holiday season, I decided to present a new playlist each day on the 'Ambient Playlist Blog' until 7th January, starting today! Afterwards I'll return to the usual scedule of three playlists a week at maximum, but will reduce my time I spend working on the blog in order to have more time for my own music and maybe even my own life aside from music related things. Starting in January I therefore will focus on high quality playlists instead of trying to feature every atmospheric music playlist my music got added to. We'll see how good this works out and then adapt further to improve the experience for everyone.

The 30th December 2025 will mark the blog's 5th Anniversary!

Have some relaxing holidays, a great time spent peacefully alone or with family and friends, and finally slow down from this really, really fast year.

- Simon | Imagine The Sea