I’m happy to announce the first new feature of 2026: Mixtapes

Mixtapes defined an entire generation. They tell stories, they share emotion, they are little time capsules that capture the soul of the creator. How could I not add them to Crucial Tracks?

Today, you too can create and share digital mixtapes on the Crucial Tracks app.

Some tidbits:

• I took a different approach with them vs. the regular entries… all mixtapes are public, including the main feed of all mixtapes. Hopefully this helps get people interested in checking out the rest of the app.
• 10 song limit! Get creative 😄 - Side A and Side B, just like old cassette tapes
• One featured image, which shows just like the Jason Molina photo on my example below
• If you have Apple Music integrated, it creates the playlist for you… if not, there’s a place to share the URL of the playlist on another service.
• You can share to Mastodon and Bluesky just like regular entries
• Hearts! These act as both a bookmark for you and a way to show appreciation
• For a first demo mixtape, I moved my Crucial Molina playlist over to the app.

Hope you enjoy! I am really excited how it turned out. (And, as always, let me know if you run into any issues or have ideas to improve!)—

Prompts!

Also, if you are a current user I added a way to submit prompt ideas for the community to use. When logged in, click the Submit Prompt Ideas link on the dashboard… then send me your ideas. I’ve got a review tool that searches to see if any similar prompts exist. If there are no matches, I approve the prompt and it gets added to the queue for others to use. A great way to give back to the community.

Anyway, thank you so much for reading, for sending in comments over email, for telling me in person how much you enjoyed an album I posted… for just using the Crucial Tracks app every day. All of it makes me so appreciative of the little community I have surrounded myself with this year. I couldn’t do any of this without you.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2026. I wish you all the very best.

The Future

With all of that said, here’s what I came up with for the future…

Experimenting with better ways to support musicians

I’m constantly thinking about how to better support musicians in this era of streaming dominance. This has been even more true since I posted Quitting Spotify, ethics, and pay per stream.

One of the most challenging aspects I’ve been thinking about is how to do my Crucial Releases column each week without relying on streaming. There’s Bandcamp for previews, but not every artist or group has a Bandcamp page. There’s YouTube, but not every artist posts every song at release. Free streaming services are out… so, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to continue using Apple Music streaming for discovery.

What I can do beyond that is commit to buying the vinyl or MP3s of my featured releases each week, whether it real time or utilizing Bandcamp Fridays to maximize the benefit to the artist.

I’m also working on an “owned music” streaming setup with either Plex or Navidrome to stream the music I do own, which is quite extensive from my days of using eMusic or ripping the CDs I purchased over the years. So far I’ve spent the most time with Plex and I’m quite impressed at how well it works.

Of course, I’ll share my adventure in more detail as I figure things out!

Interviews

The Crucial Tracks interviews have been harder than I initially planned when I launched the site. I always have feelers out with a bunch of folks, commitments from a handful of others, and (of course) a list of dream folks I’d love to have participate. Time to turn those feelers and commitments into interviews!

In Year 1, I shared 4 total interviews (including Chris and I), so in reality just two “new” total. In Year 2 (2025) I published 6 total interviews, including 5 with folks I was not friends with before the interview. So that’s a big improvement in my opinion. For 2026, I’d love to share 10-12 interviews from a wide variety of folks. I think I can make that happen…

Other regular content

I’ve experimented with a few regular columns beyond Crucial Releases and the interview series… I’d like to continue those, as well as branch out into other areas, including guest columnists. We’ll see where that goes… but for now, expect:

• Crucial Playlists
  My first pass at something like this was Crucial Molina, where I took a look at Jason Molina’s music in a little more depth. Expect more here, including looks at record labels and music scenes.
• Operation Mainstream
  This is a series where I look at Rolling Stones latest top 500 albums and do a focused listen of albums I wasn’t entirely familiar with, to expand my musical knowledge beyond obscure indie rock, hardcore, and punk bands. 😄
• Music Book Club
  Thinking maybe once a quarter I pick a music related book to read and the community can read along and blog about their thoughts. More to come on that!

The app

The Crucial Tracks app has been wildly more successful than I ever imagined with over 220 members closing in on 4,000 posts. It’s still so fun to read how people respond to the prompts and check out the songs that are shared.

What I’d like to accomplish in 2026:

• Add support for user submitted mixtapes – I think this could be a cool, creative thing for the community, to allow folks to build themed mixes or even their own Crucial Molina type playlist. Lots of possibilities.
• Add support for Desert Island Discs. I’ve gotten a number of requests for album support and I think adding something in this area would fit the general vibe of the app.
• A way for users to submit prompt ideas – simple enough and a good way to expand the prompt options, which is currently at 160.
• Double the number of community members. I’m planning some kind of member drive in Q1 with giveaways and other perks for not only joining the app (it’s free!), but helping me cover the costs of the app and blog as we continue to grow.
• Maybe an iOS app? I think this alone would help me double members, but it’s also the most complicated thing I’ve mentioned so far…

And I’m sure there’s something cool I haven’t even thought of yet… the Crucial Tracks app wasn’t even an idea this time last year.

✌️🤘
–Jason

It took a little over 2 weeks to get us to 25 users and 100 posts. It’s been nearly 4 weeks since that milestone and we’ve just hit 100 users and 560 posts on the site. So cool!

New Stuff

As far as the app goes, it’s been a little over a month since the last update and a lot has happened! The changelog should always have the latest details, but here’s an overview of what’s been added since:

Community & Sharing

• Community Tracks - a weekly curated playlist from the Crucial Tracks community
• Add (optional) additional, custom text when you share to Mastodon and Bluesky.
• Added community links to the dashboard: Public Tracks and Community Playlists
• Added profile badges for the first 100 users and numbers of posts created (10/30/60)
• Added an RSS feed to Public Tracks page
• Added webring functionality to public profile pages

Prompts

• Improved prompt scheduling and added a Last 10 Prompts view
• Utilize past prompts when creating entries for days in the past - the prompts from the last two weeks are available. (Select older days on the calendar widget or select a past day on the Create Entry page, then click Use Daily Prompt button)

UI Improvements

• Added **markdown toolbar **for entry content
• Improved the selected song UI
• Improved styling for some HTML elements

General

• Added user time zone support
• Added support for passing an Apple Music song via URL to start an entry with that song on Crucial Tracks. More info here. (Shortcuts!?!)
• Add to Homescreen + Add to Dock - on Apple devices you can now add Crucial Tracks to your dock and/or homescreen.

State of the Community

For this section, I’d like to call out a few members each month, not only to highlight good stories and songs, but to say thanks for taking a chance on this site and their overall contributions to the community.

• For this first feature, I have to pick Cliff Wade who not only posts great stories, but has helped me track down bugs and other issues. Very thankful for that!
• Also of note, I’ve been enjoying melanie’s posts and stories… and Brandon’s music interests overlap with mine quite a bit so I’ve been enjoying those song selections.

All in all, I think the community is doing a fabulous job sharing stories and songs, and the breadth of genres is something I was not expecting. I think I’ve seen everything but opera so far! I know I’ve found a few new-to-me artists, so really loving that aspect as well.

Well, I’ve rambled long enough… so I will close this out with a final thanks and if you run into issues or have a feature request, do not hesitate to reach out.

–Jason

It’s even more clear now that music is one of the key things that links us – whether you are into rock, pop, punk, jazz, EDM, rap, ska, whatever (it amazes me the variety I see on the site even with a smallish number of users)… in the end each song has humanity and life experience behind it that we can all relate to, even if you don’t “understand” the song.

I’m going to do my best to keep that feeling going, but I also understand we’ve all been trained over the last 20+ years for “engagement”, through algorithms and just getting bombarded with information. The slowness might be hard to handle at first, but I want this site to be different. I just hope that feeling is enough to keep folks interested and coming back. It feels like a radical idea, so I’ll have my fingers crossed.

I’ve certainly been getting feature requests and questions that have made me really think… like adding comments for example. My gut instinct was ‘no’ – comments tend to be the worst thing about many sites, but also have the potential to be the best. Not sure how I could implement them in a way that makes it valuable and not a slog.

I do kind of like that reading posts now just sparks thoughts – potentially influencing your next post or your opinion on a song. Or just the simple feeling of empathy. I do have some ideas that could help build community and connection, so we’ll see what comes of them… I will be careful when adding big things like this, though.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has checked out the site, posted, sent comments, boosted my posts… supported or participated in any way. These last few weeks have been amazing.

For those that haven’t checked out the site yet: if a slow, thoughtful, meaningful anxiety-free music community sounds interesting, come join us! We are very interested in reading about the songs that made you, you.

In case you missed it

In addition to the basic features I launched with, I’ve been able to implement some more cool features and a lot of the tweaks requested by the community:

• Full Apple Music playlist integration - if you are an Apple Music subscriber, you can connect to the service and automatically add each day’s song to a playlist of your choosing. Perfect to build a playlist to represent your year!
• Social sharing: you can now automatically share each public entry on Mastodon and/or Bluesky when you post. (Example)
• Improved Daily Prompts: the earliest version of the site had just a few prompts randomly selected for the day. This caused many issues! Now there are more prompts in place and a system to make sure we rotate through all prompts before they are recycled.
• Public Tracks: a new view available when you are logged in to the app that shows that last 50 public posts on the site. Read other community member’s posts, find new music, and maybe even find an internet friend!
• Improved public profiles - you can now add a link to your Apple Music playlist (in addition to the social and blog links) and each entry now has it’s own page to help with RSS and sharing. (Example)
• More preferences: visit your profile settings to pick your date format and customize your shared entry title to your liking. (An example of someone with both customizations)

I’ve also added a Help and FAQs page and a changelog here. (Be sure to check the FAQs if you are enabling Apple Music, Mastodon, or Bluesky. That will definitely help you set those features up correctly!)

If you’ve been following this site (or my music writing in general) for a bit of time, you’ll know I have been doing a “music journal” or song-a-day playlist on Apple Music for the last four years. The basic premise of that idea is to add one meaningful song to my playlist each day.

It could be a song I listened to during the day, a new band I “discovered” that day, a song to represent something that i did (like going to a concert), or a song that was meaningful for other reasons (like my mom’s favorite song; she passed away in 2022.) There are no limits, really…

The best part of this is listening to the playlists later. It could be on long car trips or just throwing one on while you make dinner or clean the house… the memories come flooding back when each song plays. It’s pretty awesome.

This process, along with a blog series I did during the early days of COVID, helped build the idea for this site and the Crucial Tracks interview series. As you’ve read, these interviews take a deeper look into the impact of music on some really amazing people. The whole process of thinking about music – how it helped create who you are today, how it influences memories and feelings, is fascinating. I love it… and everyone I’ve done interviews with so far really enjoyed participating.

There are points in your life that are defined by music. Whether it’s a song that introduced you to a genre of music that changed the direction of your tastes and style, or a lyric that made you think about the world in a different way. Songs represent relationships. Songs trigger memories. These are all crucial tracks.

So that got me thinking — what if I combined these ideas with my love of blogging and created an app where anyone can share their Crucial Tracks with the world? And the Crucial Tracks app was born.

The app is a simple, focused blogging service (music journal) that helps you think about the role music plays in your life… and allows you to easily share your thoughts and these meaningful songs with the world. The songs that make you, you.

The basic features so far:

• the ability to post once per day (you can write about any song or use one of the built-in prompts)
• search Apple Music to add a 30 second song preview to your post so others can listen along
• every entry defaults to Private, but Public posts show on your profile page, complete with an RSS feed to hook up wherever you like. See my profile as an example. (There’s also a setting to default all to public too!)
• members can view the Public Tracks feed to see the latest posts from the community - find new songs and interesting people to follow via RSS or social media

Ultimately, I think the internet needs more weird, focused small communities. That’s what made the web so exciting when I first got access in the early/mid 90s and I hope my little project helps bring that feeling back in some way. (And maybe, just maybe, it will be a gateway for more folks to get their own site and blog.)

If this sounds interesting, sign up today for free!

The reception has been amazing so far and I’m so glad others seem as excited about the idea as I am. I hope you join us!

Into the weeds

As with every site, there are design choices to be made and goals set. Here are some of my guiding principles for this app:

• I didn’t want to create another social network or place where you have to follow someone, comment, like, or whatever. That shit can be tiring and there are enough services already.
• I also didn’t want to create another high-speed firehose type site where there’s constantly something new for you to view. Crucial Tracks will be SLOW and that will take some getting used to (me included!)
• I wanted to support RSS from day one. I truly believe that RSS is one of the best web inventions, because it allows you to do so much with just a simple feed… you can follow other users (and news sites, blogs, etc), you can send your posts anywhere using services like IFTTT or services like micro.blog that support inbound RSS. (For example, my entries get posted to my blog on micro.blog automatically and then get sent to Mastodon and Bluesky with no action on my part.)
• I wanted to integrate with Apple Music. (No Spotify, ever, sorry. Apple Music isn’t perfect, but Spotify are just bad faith actors in the music and entertainment industry. Actually, I’m not sorry.)
• Same goes for integration with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, etc. No algorithmic, centralized, corporate-owned social media, ever. It’s time to get off those sites for good. You can do whatever you want with the RSS feed, but that’s as much as you will get from me. Again, not sorry.