Last.fm: quantifying my media consumption

Using my laptop's iTunes, I've listened to 1,331 songs by The Hold Steady. I've listened to 59 songs by Murs in the last seven days. In the past three months I've listened to 79 songs by Belle and Sebastian. In the past year, I've listened to the Guided By Voices record Alien Lanes, more than any other album.

I know all of this because, since April 29, 2009 I've been using the music tracking website Last.fm, and I've been loving it. iTunes play-counts are nice, but a new computer, or a hard-drive crash can erase those fragile records. Last.fm records every song as you are playing it on your computer, it records these plays, and allow you to statistically analyze your listening habits in a number of ways. My obsession with Last.fm reminds me of the baseball debate between sabermetrics (advanced statistical analysis of players), and a veteran manager's gut-feeling assessment of his lineup. How can I love band A more than band B when band B has twice as many plays in my last.fm library. Sometimes tracking your play counts can become embarrassingly addictive, and it's sometimes difficult not to let your Last.fm influence your listening habits (I should listen to two more songs by Mos Def, because that will get me to 200 plays).


There is more to the website than just tracking your plays, it has profiles of every artist, allows you to network with your friends (and feel either superior or inferior when you compare play counts). You can see how musically comparable you are with your friends and you can meet people who have similar musical tastes. One of the sites finest characteristics, is that the site recommends new music based on what you are currently listening to. The system is not perfect, and is sometimes based more on popularity of a band rather than their sound. So if you like an obscure garage-rock band, you can find other similar obscure garage-rock bands, but Last.fm will probably not tell you what popular garage-rock bands they sound like.

In general it's a bizarre way to consume media, before the internet, no one would know how many times they played a record, obsession was not a quantifiable thing. But now on last.fm, you can see you listens to Jay-Z the most (among Last.fm users). Obviously the site does not account for when you listen to a cd in your car, or listen to a vinyl record, but since most of my listening is on the computer, it is a wonderfully time-consuming tool.

Quick Aside: While it is easy and convenient to discover music on Last.fm or anywhere else on the internet, it is entirely incomparable to hearing new music because of a recommendation from a friend. Music is something that should be shared, and a list of recommendations calculated by a computer will never be better than a mixtape from a thoughtful friend.