The year in numbers: Last.fm statistics for 2012

I crossed a pretty big threshold a few days ago: I logged 100,000 listens on Last.fm.

I’ve been a member since Feb. 28, 2006, so it’s taken me nearly six years to reach this point. My Top 10 artists account for roughly 13 percent of those 100,000 listens, and the list isn’t terribly surprising:

  1. Tokyo Jihen
  2. Cocco
  3. Duran Duran
  4. Shiina Ringo
  5. Eponymous 4
  6. Kate Bush
  7. Emmylou Harris
  8. John Adams
  9. Philip Glass
  10. Steve Reich

One thing to know about my listening habits is the fact I still consume entire albums. As a result, my statistics indicate I listen to a few number of artists but with great frequency.

Here’s the activity from the last 12 months:

  1. Tokyo Jihen
  2. Fugazi
  3. Dead Can Dance
  4. Santigold
  5. Guided By Voices
  6. itsnotyouitsme
  7. John Lunn
  8. The Smashing Pumpkins
  9. Györgi Ligeti
  10. Philip Glass

In most of these cases, the frequency of listens for these artists can be attributed to multiple albums from one artists getting regular rotation (Tokyo Jihen, Dead Can Dance, Smashing Pumpkins) or by albums with a high track count (John Lunn, Philip Glass, itsnotyouitsme). Guided by Voices fits both criteria for releasing three albums in one year with enormous track counts.

Tokyo Jihen monopolized the year with three releases, two of which competed for a slot on the year-end Favorite List. John Lunn is the composer of the Downton Abbey soundtrack, which I played quite a lot at the beginning of the year. Recommended if you like Richard Robbins or Michael Nyman.

itsnotyouitsme released a double album last year, Everyone’s Pain is Magnificent. It’s the kind of post-rock that goes beyond the blurred distortion of MONO and Explosions in the Sky, and I played it a lot.

In reality, Györgi Ligeti’s entry on this list is due to metadata tagging. That’s really Jeremy Denk playing Ligeti’s etudes.

Although Smashing Pumpkins released a new album this year, it’s the reissue of Gish that bumped them into the list. I wouldn’t normally listen to that much Smashing Pumpkins.

The Fugazi number is also an interesting statistic. I own only two albums from the band: 13 Songs and Repeater. But I’ve been using Spotify to listen to the other albums in the band’s discography to figure out which one to get next. As a result, I gave them a lot of spins in the past year.

The most deceiving statistic of all is the overall count for Eponymous 4, my home studio project. If I logged every time I listened to a mix of a song I was working on, that count would skew the entire curve. When I do log a listen, it’s from one of the “officially” released albums.

I do find it amusing that I appear to favor the music of Tokyo Jihen, Cocco, Shiina Ringo and Duran Duran over my own. Actually, that’s not odd at all.