The Fave Songs by Year Challenge

P.S. — Welcome to the new music publication PubBeat!

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Hello and welcome to my new music-related publication, PubBeat!

Some of you may remember I used to run a pub here on Medium called Plethora of Pop. While music was the most-written about topic there, we also covered other pop culture-related topics such as TV, movies, and books.

One of the things I loved most about running Plethora of Pop was creating writing challenges for those who wrote for the publication. I did them on a very regular basis and, I’m happy to say, a lot of people seemed to enjoy participating in those challenges.

I’ve missed creating and doing challenges with my Medium friends, so I decided to start doing them again. However, this time around, all of the challenges will be centered around music.

That’s why I created PubBeat. Once a month (and sometimes more), I’ll create a new music-related challenge and post it here. If you choose to do so, you can share your replies to the challenges here.

On the flip-side (music pun definitely intended there), if you want to write your replies and share them elsewhere, that’s cool too. This is all meant to be pressure-free, so participate in the challenges however you like.

The inaugural challenge here will be…drumroll, please….

The Fave Songs by Year Challenge

This is a slight variation of a challenge I created last year over on Bluesky (follow me there). That challenge was called #20SongsByYear. It was pretty simple to play: participants could choose any year that they liked, and then for 20 consecutive days, they would post one song per day from that year.

Thankfully, it was very well-received and a lot of people participated in it. My initial plan had been to do it for just one month, but then it went on for several more months afterward.

Soooo….I thought it would be fun to do a version of that challenge here!

However, Medium is much different than Bluesky and I’m obviously not going to ask people here to do 20 posts over 20 consecutive days. I don’t even want to set a specific and limiting number of songs to use. So, here’s the simple challenge:

Pick a year that contained a lot of music you love and then write a piece in which you share multiple songs from that year.

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Are there 20 songs you’re crazy about from the year 1990 that you’d like to write about? How about 10 songs from the year 1975? Or maybe 13 songs from 2026?

However many songs you want to use (within reason, of course) from whatever year you like. If you want to go into details about what you like about each song, that’s fine. If you’d rather keep things more minimal than that, that’s fine too. You do you.

I just ask that you consider using Fave Songs By Year as one of your topics, so that other participants can easily find what you wrote.

And, most importantly…have fun with it all!

If you want to do this challenge and share it here in PubBeat, I’ll happily add you as a writer to the publication.

Also, as I said earlier, I’ll be creating challenges here every month. If this particular challenge doesn’t speak to you, maybe future ones will — so please follow us!

If you want to be added as a writer for PubBeat, please leave me a comment on this post and I’ll add you. I look forward to reading whatever you want to share here!

P.S. — For detailed information on our submission guidelines, please visit our very appropriately-titled Submission Guidelines for PubBeat page.

Also, if you have any questions or comments related to PubBeat, please feel free to email me at BuddyGottWrites@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading. Have a great day!

Buddy Gott

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Below I’m tagging some of my “old” music-loving friends from Plethora of Pop and elsewhere to let them know about this new place. Of course, all music lovers are welcome here!

P.S. — If you’re not already familiar with these good writers and good people, click on their names to be led to their wonderful words!

Paul Combs Alex Markham Mark Holburn Barry Silverstein Francis B. Arpad Nagy George Weeks Robert Gowty Steffany Ritchie Jeffrey Harvey Jessica Lee McMillan Nichola Scurry Darrell Rials Amol Shrikhande Steven Hale Rachel Anderson Laura Lind Jesse Perez Kevin Alexander Terry Barr Kerry Purvis