2011 in Music: Last.fm Stats

This is the third in a seven-part series on my favorite music from 2011.

  1. Favorite Albums
  2. Favorite Songs
  3. Last.fm Stats
  4. Favorite Sounds
  5. Favorite Music Writing
  6. My Friends and Myself
  7. Miscellany

I was inspired by Best New Music Writer Jamieson Cox for this portion of my year-end wrap-up – he dissected his top-scrobbled albums on Last.fm to see if his picks for albums of the year corresponded to the ones he actually listened to the most. They did.

So here are the albums I listened to I scrobbled the most this year, ranked descending by hours listened:

(Calculations: album plays are the total listens divided by the tracks on the album, and the time listened is the album plays multiplied by the album length. This is imperfect for obvious reasons, but whatever.)

Mine correspond pretty well too.

But the correlation here is what I’m most interested in, because I know the exactness of the numbers is off:

  • Until last week, when I downloaded ScrobblePod, none of the tracks I played on my iPhone got scrobbled at all this year. (This is normally the sort of thing I’d go crazy over and try to correct, but in what I’m going to call a personal victory over obsessive anxiety, I managed to let it go almost all year.) The biggest example here is probably Shlohmo’s Bad Vibes, which I listened to on my phone repeatedly and often.
  • The ambient records I enjoyed this year were almost exclusively played on my phone.
  • I played Tomboy, Burst Apart, and The King of Limbs on vinyl quite a bit, because I’m fancy.

This was a fun, quick experiment, and it was good to see I remembered my own listening habits relatively well. We’ll see if I can get in a good year of scrobbling in next year.

A small amendment here. Inaccurate iPod updating, overly zealous notifications, and a ton of duplicate scrobbles have made ScrobblePod unusable for me. This morning I discovered Melo, which is doing quite well so far.