I’ve been tracking my musical listening habits for 12 years, and these are the stats
Back in 2005, I was a member of the Thrice Message Board. Much fun was had there before it was eventually shutdown, but one of the things that’s stuck (aside from some lifelong internet friendships) is my love for “scrobbling”. In February of that year, a bunch of the members signed up for audioscrobbler, or as it’s now known, last.fm. I’ve continued scrobbling my music listening ever since, watching my listening habits evolve over time, and it’s helped me discover new music, and re-discover old artists.
I figured I would have a look at some of the rudimentary data, like number of scrobbles (a tracked listen of a single song), and number of unique tracks/artists/albums, and see if there’s anything I can glean from it. First let’s look at a probably useless stacked bar graph.
Let’s make some initial conclusions before we dive a bit deeper into the data.
- I was still in university in 2005 and 2006, so a lot of music was on in the background while studying, or playing on my iriver h340 mp3 player while walking to/from and around campus.
- Audioscrobbler likely wasn’t pulling proper album stats back in 2005 since there’s only 16 reported albums.
- As I’ve gotten older, I listen to less music on average.
- For some reason, 2015 was a very light year for total plays (missed scrobbles?), but a high number of unique artists which means lots of playlists/radio.
- I’m sure a lot of those scrobbles in the first few years were while I was sleeping. Seems ridiculous to think I could listen to 52 songs per day all year.
The first stat I want to delve a bit further into is the number of unique artists per year. Here’s the data in a probably inappropriate irregular pie chart:
I see two things in this set of data. The first is that around 2011, the number of artists increases slightly, and secondly that it explodes in 2014. I can attribute this to a change in how I consumed music. From 2005–2011 I was only listening to the music I had collected digitally. My library was fairly substantial, but if I wanted to listen to a new artist it meant downloading an album or two, adding it to my library and mp3 player, and choosing to listen to it in my library. In 2011, I signed up for the ill-fated (but still my favourite streaming service) rdio. This gave me the ability to listen to almost anything I wanted, and could listen to a station of a particular artist and discover similar artists (similar to Pandora which still isn’t available in Canada). In 2014, I switched from rdio to Google Play Music when it became available north of the border and saw a massive explosion in the number of artists, particularly after Google’s acquisition of Songza.
I guess another stat to look at might be, on average, how many times was each individual track scrobbled. I’m sure we won’t learn anything new, but charts are fun to look at (right?), so let’s see if we can find an appropriate graph, like a semi-circle?
This shows what I’d already deduced from the number of unique artists. While listening to my own library of mp3s, I would listen to a lot of the same tracks over and over, but as streaming became my main method of consumption, a lot more tracks were only listened to once in the entire year. This tracks with listening to radio stations where some songs/artists would never be looked into again.
Since three charts is about all I can reasonably ask anyone to read, and all of the data is really just sitting there in the first chart anyway, I’m just going to wrap this up. We’ve already come to most of the conclusions that would traditionally go in a closing statement on a blog post anyway. Namely, less scrobbles as I get older, and more artists because I’m lazy in my musical choices and streaming services make this easy. Streaming changed my listening habits, for better or worse. Yadda yadda yadda, thanks for reading.
