Yoga Playlists: My Spotify Account & May Music

I get a lot of questions around my music. People ask: "How often do you create new playlists?", "how do you find your music?", "I loved that one song towards the end, is your playlist on Spotify?!". So here are some answers, some demystifiers for my process of creating a yoga playlist.

First of all, I only create 1-2 new playlists per month for yoga and use them all month long. That's just my personal preference. I enjoy music but I'm not a music junkie and for me it's a little challenging to come up with a playlist I love so I work hard at making one or two good ones and then stick to those, occasionally making small tweaks as the month wears on. Usually if I make changes it is to the first few songs or the last few songs, those are generally the ones students start to remember or notice.

I also like to have mostly music people aren't super familiar with and then throw in a few popular songs for recognition sake. It's fun to mix it up so that students can get out of their heads and flow but also feel a song they know.

Most of my classes are an hour long but I do teach two 45 minute classes and one hour and fifteen minute class, so for those I have to alter.

Quite honestly my hour and fifteen I almost always use the same playlist, it's wonderful, it works, and my students really enjoy it. It's soft music as the class is a late evening level 1 in the burbs and we take it slow. This one is called "Soft" in my playlists.

My 45 minute monthly playlist is usually a shorter rendition of that month's hour long playlist.

One other thing you'll see on my Spotify if you go browsing, is that some of my playlists are labeled as my name and dat, and those ones are for my SPENGA classes. Those playlists are usually an hour and fifteen to an hour and twenty minutes of music and this is how they break down:

First 20 minutes are my spin songs
Second 20 minutes are my strength songs
Third 20 minutes are my yoga songs
Final 15-20 minutes are background music to have in the studio between my classes

For yoga classes here is how I structure my music:

First 1-2 songs are warm up, a little bit slower or just ones people would want to hear as they work into their bodies
The next group of 3-4 songs is what we usually start moving to with late integration and sun A's
The middle section of the playlist, about 20 minutes of music is more upbeat for Sun B and escalation.
After that I've got 1-2 songs that start to mellow out for balancing and backbends
And the final 10 minutes before shivasana is very mellow, acoustic sometimes, soft voices
For shivasana I like to pick a song that either doesn't have any words or really minimal words. Calming noises are a great option too.

My favorites are March/April/May of 2017 & October/December 2016.

Check them out and let me know what you think (username: Vcohen22)! Would love recommendations - comment below!