I had 6,896 songs I'd never played, so I let rules decide what to do with them

My Apple Music library has 15,713 songs in it, and 6,896 of them have never been played. That’s 44% of the library.

Judging 6,896 songs one at a time was never going to happen. So instead of deciding what to delete, I wrote down what I’d obviously keep and let those rules make most of the calls.

A song stays by default if it’s a favorite or in one of my own playlists. It also stays if I added it in the last year, or if it’s from a CD I ripped and uploaded myself. Same for any song on an album where I’ve played another track at least twice. And any artist with 500 or more plays across their other songs keeps their unplayed ones too. Those artists get their own tab, so I can switch one off if I disagree.

Then I built a review page that lists everything by artist. Each artist has one button that cycles through three choices: let the rules decide, keep everything, or delete whatever’s unplayed. Even delete still spares favorites, playlist songs and CD rips. Open an artist and each album gets its own switch. Anything I’ve already decided drops off the list, so the page gets shorter as I go.

The rules keep 3,929 of the 6,896 on their own. That leaves 2,967 for me to look at, mostly an artist or album at a time.

Nothing has been deleted yet, on purpose. My picks are saved to a backup file, and the delete step isn’t built. First I want a backup of the Music library itself and a fresh export. I also want to confirm my ripped CDs are safe on my home storage server. With Sync Library on, deleting from Apple Music also deletes from every device on my account, so I’m fine going slow.

If you’ve got a library like this, I’d like to hear how you’ve handled it, or whether you’ve just made peace with it.