94,914 plays since October ’05

April 9, 2009 • 12:17 pm • POSTED BY lwalczak

I love music more than most things. I also have an insatiable thirst for information and statistics. A few years back I was referred to a service called last.fm, which basically keeps track of your listening habits (at a computer or ipod) and makes sense of these, as well as serves a role as a social network and resource for concerts and artist information. In December of 06, Lee Byron put together his Listening History project, collecting his personal last.fm listening data and using Processing to create a visualization of his habits. A few months back, I started to see ads across the top of the last.fm page from HP, making these visualizations available to any user. LastGraph now offers a these visualizations in several varieties.

The “Poster” iteration is pretty, and perhaps shows a great deal of info in a timeline sort of way. Above is my past year in music. [Go ahead, click it and take a look at the whole huge thing in detail!] To point out a couple interesting spots, in the middle of August I was on the open road driving to Seattle, so as I probably still listened to plenty of music, the plays were not recorded by Alison’s car. [Yes, that first image way up top^^^]

Also, in my transition to Philadelphia, not having internet for a week or so made a significant dent in my listening stats.

In a strange way, these visualizations serve as a bit of a diary — spikes and drops often correlate to shows I attended, acquisitions/releases of albums, and even making new friends.

I eat this stuff up. Last.fm provides charts showing frequency of artists/songs at varying intervals of time too, for a more number-driven information. I’m at 94,914 plays since October 2005.
(and counting!)