I enjoy looking back at what I had been listening to in previous years as well. But playlists in Spotify have a "Date added" column, so you get a chronology from there. I guess splitting them out into years means you can shuffle a single year. Apart from that it seems to just complicate the process.

My "Starred" playlist has the first song added in 2010. When Spotify decided "Like" was now going to be how to favourite songs i just ignored it and kept using the Starred playlist.

I do wish the play history and play counts were kept longer. Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime play counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.