PLAYLISTICLE: Verve 50 [2012-2015] and Blue Note 101 [2014]

When I acquired two large jazz collections out of the blue in 2021 and 2022, there were a few commonalities between the collections. Only one of the collections had vintage vinyl albums on the Blue Note label, but both collections had corresponding compact discs for each of those vinyls. Each of the two collections also had the nine discs above in common as well. One of the collections even had a few discs from the Verve Today series, a predecessor of the Verve & Blue Note Today samplers depicted above.

Before the sampler discs mentioned above, Verve began uploading a series of virtual playlists to streaming services in 2012. These Verve 50 playlists were not to celebrate the label's 50th Anniversary, as some might think, as that milestone occurred in 1994. Verve 50 was a celebration of the breadth and depth of the label's catalog with each of the playlists containing a whopping 50 tracks.

A further five playlists were uploaded in 2013. My grandson just added it up in his head because he hasn't learned multiplication yet – that's an incredible 550 tracks of high-quality jazz music from Verve. Not too shabby.

In 2014, Blue Note offered a series of six virtual samplers on streaming services titled Blue Note 101. Each playlist in the series had a theme with ten songs from the label's extensive catalog supporting that theme.