Listening Habits

In the hayday of customizing everything on my computer, I stumbled on some recommendation to start recording the music I listened to to Last.fm. I think this might have been a period when Last.fm seemed like one of the best recommendation engines. There was a plugin I could use in my local music player - my beloved Foobar2000 (the best and most customizable music player after Winamp slowly self-destructed). It was a fortuitous decision, as I've now recorded everything I listened to since then, with the regrettable exception of a period from 2017-2023 when I was using Google Play Music. I also was using Spotify during part of this time without realizing I could set up the connection. Still, I have a lot of data since February 2005: 135,147 tracks played over 16.4 years of logging.

• 135,147 scrobbles
• 5,473 artists
• 9,991 albums
• 33,280 distinct tracks
• 3,449 days with music
• 39.18 per listening day

Usage over time

Here we can see how that usage shook out. The busiest was October 2006 at 3,211 plays. I was originally recording with a Foobar2000 plugin. Eventually, in 2016, I switched to playing via streaming and stopped using a local music player except on rare occasions. Then in 2023 I discovered that there was a way to enable logging in Spotify and started logging again. We can see that history trend in the chart below.

Top artists, over twenty years

We can see below the trend fo all of my top artists across this time period. It's a good way to see how popular each of these artists was for me at at a given point of time. Some artists I listened to an awful lot and then never really returned to (Feist, Dath Cab). Others have had great staying power (Pearl Jam, Sufjan Stevens). And others are new hits (Maromaro, War on Drugs).

Displayed in four-week bins from Feb 7, 2005.

Top ten artists, year by year

Here we can see all of my top bands together in one go. There's a lot of variation in any given year - grey bands are those that charted in at most one year. The 15 artists who charted in three years or more keep the same colour throughout.

• Pearl Jam (9 yrs)
• Sigur Rós (8 yrs)
• Bob Dylan (6 yrs)
• The Beatles (6 yrs)
• Sufjan Stevens (5 yrs)
• Calexico (4 yrs)
• The Decemberists (4 yrs)
• Andrew Bird (3 yrs)
• Cat Power (3 yrs)
• Hermanos Gutiérrez (3 yrs)
• Iron & Wine (3 yrs)
• Led Zeppelin (3 yrs)
• The National (3 yrs)
• The Tallest Man on Earth (3 yrs)
• The War on Drugs (3 yrs)
• that year's others

Most played, all time

Counted from 135,147 scrobbles, last updated 2026-07-19. Hours are plays times track length. Track length sourced from MusicBrainz, which only knows for the 697 artists whose albums were fetched — 53.4% of plays, and anywhere from 13% to 95% of them depending on the artist. Ranking on only what is measured would rank that coverage as much as the listening, so a play with no known length is charged that artist's average instead (251.2s across everything). Rows marked ≈ are more estimate than measurement; hover any row for its exact split.

Staying power

A final breakdown before we move on to something else. How many weeks did I listen to a band? Any play during a given week counts for this measure. This is measured across a total of 659 weeks that had any logged music in them at all.

• Pearl Jam 2005–2026 185
• Sigur Rós 2005–2026 156
• Sufjan Stevens 2006–2026 150
• Iron & Wine 2005–2026 145
• Andrew Bird 2006–2026 139
• The Beatles 2005–2026 124
• Calexico 2006–2026 124
• Cat Power 2005–2026 121
• The National 2007–2026 120
• Radiohead 2005–2026 116
• Pink Floyd 2005–2026 107
• The Decemberists 2005–2026 91
• The Rolling Stones 2006–2026 90
• Led Zeppelin 2005–2026 90
• Drive-By Truckers 2008–2026 89
• Red Hot Chili Peppers 2005–2026 88
• The Black Keys 2008–2026 87
• Belle and Sebastian 2006–2026 85
• Bob Dylan 2005–2026 84
• Arcade Fire 2006–2026 81
• Yo La Tengo 2005–2026 80
• All Them Witches 2024–2026 79
• Kurt Vile 2014–2026 79
• Wilco 2005–2026 78
• Band of Horses 2006–2026 78

Weeks with at least one play, out of 659 listening weeks since 2005. Hover a row for the play count behind it.

Densest listening

Artists that began creating before 2005, or who I discovered early, are naturally going to have an advantage in totals. So this metric is the number of tracks played per day since an artist first appears in my logs. This separates a recent obsession from long-standing names. Pearl Jam's 2,256 plays are the biggest total on the site, but spread across twenty years they work out slower than Maromaro, who I only started playing in 2024. This does skew more towards recent artists, since I often got into them recently and still listen to them and they haven't had as much time to fall out of rotation.

This also only counts years I was actually scrobbling. Also, artists need at least 100 plays to qualify (310 meet that criteria); without a floor the list fills with a bunch of artists that I just listened to a bit recently.

• Maromaro 2024 1.09
• StarBenders 2025 0.97
• Kfir Ochaion 2025 0.96
• Hermanos Gutiérrez 2023 0.84
• liquify 2025 0.73
• The War on Drugs 2023 0.72
• Black Elephant 2025 0.51
• All Them Witches 2024 0.51
• Buckethead 2023 0.46
• Pearl Jam 2005 0.40
• Sigur Rós 2005 0.39
• Sufjan Stevens 2006 0.38
• HUNTR/X 2025 0.35
• Kishi Bashi 2023 0.34
• The Beatles 2005 0.33
• Calexico 2006 0.33
• Marika Hackman 2024 0.30
• King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard 2024 0.29
• Iron & Wine 2005 0.29
• Watchhouse 2023 0.27
• Monolord 2024 0.27
• Andrew Bird 2006 0.25
• Olivia Rodrigo 2023 0.24
• Philip Sayce 2024 0.23
• Cat Power 2005 0.23

Binges

Density, top bands, and staying power are all to some extent aggregate metrics. My binge metrics do the opposite: the most plays of one artist, or one song, within a single window. The heaviest was The Beatles — 205 plays in the 24 hours from Sep 11, 2006. I think the results are fascinating to be honest. Even with just the 24 hour window I expected a lot more pop hits and bands to show up here. These do skew more towards "one-hit wonders" but they aren't what I would have expected. I do recognize a few of these as "sleeping music" I put on when I needed consistent noise to fall asleep or stay asleep.

To avoid the same binges showing up over and over on a sliding window, once a name is picked its plays within 7 days either side are struck out. Then it goes back in the running, so an artist appears twice only for two genuinely separate binges.

One-song bands

Some artists I have listened to hundreds of times and mostly that was just a single song. Maybe they just have one banger or maybe I just haven't explored their catalog. Each bar below is one artist's entire play count, divided by which song it went to: the darkest block is their single biggest track. Ranked so that both a lopsided share and a real play count are weighted.

• Razorlight 162 plays 53.1%
• Ron Gallo 105 plays 40.0%
• Waxahatchee 105 plays 40.0%
• The Weeknd 210 plays 39.1%
• Laura Veirs 100 plays 39.0%
• The Submarines 126 plays 38.9%
• Islands 178 plays 37.1%
• Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats 106 plays 36.8%
• Dirty Three 113 plays 35.4%
• The Raconteurs 112 plays 34.8%
• HUNTR/X 130 plays 32.3%
• Olivia Rodrigo 267 plays 31.8%
• Brazil 162 plays 31.5%
• Rubinstein-Heifetz-Feuermann Trio 294 plays 30.3%
• Fleet Foxes 240 plays 28.7%
• Audioslave 191 plays 27.2%
• Asaf Avidan & The Mojos 251 plays 25.5%
• Jack White 231 plays 25.1%
• Porcupine Tree 288 plays 25.0%
• Iron & Wine and Calexico 222 plays 23.9%
• Rammstein 313 plays 22.7%
• Neko Case 284 plays 22.5%
• Dire Straits 395 plays 20.0%
• Nick Cave & Warren Ellis 371 plays 20.0%
• Cat Power 1,314 plays 11.9%

• The Submarines 126 plays 67.5%
• Razorlight 162 plays 66.7%
• Jefferson Starship 128 plays 60.2%
• Waxahatchee 105 plays 59.1%
• Ron Gallo 105 plays 58.1%
• Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats 106 plays 57.6%
• The Weeknd 210 plays 55.2%
• Asaf Avidan & The Mojos 251 plays 48.6%
• HUNTR/X 130 plays 46.9%
• Rubinstein-Heifetz-Feuermann Trio 294 plays 45.2%
• Iron & Wine and Calexico 222 plays 45.1%
• Marika Hackman 168 plays 44.6%
• Brazil 162 plays 43.8%
• Islands 178 plays 43.3%
• Olivia Rodrigo 267 plays 42.3%
• Gregory Alan Isakov 201 plays 40.8%
• Jack White 231 plays 40.7%
• Fleet Foxes 240 plays 37.9%
• Porcupine Tree 288 plays 37.9%
• Kishi Bashi 337 plays 35.9%
• Rammstein 313 plays 30.7%
• Dire Straits 395 plays 28.3%
• Nick Cave & Warren Ellis 371 plays 27.5%
• Kanye West 502 plays 25.3%
• Cat Power 1,314 plays 19.6%

• The Submarines 126 plays 82.5%
• Rubinstein-Heifetz-Feuermann Trio 294 plays 82.0%
• HUNTR/X 130 plays 80.0%
• Razorlight 162 plays 79.6%
• Iron & Wine and Calexico 222 plays 79.3%
• The Weeknd 210 plays 73.8%
• Bobby Previte 166 plays 68.7%
• Asaf Avidan & The Mojos 251 plays 66.9%
• Gregory Alan Isakov 201 plays 65.2%
• Fleet Foxes 240 plays 61.7%
• Jack White 231 plays 60.6%
• A.C. Newman 257 plays 59.1%
• The Postal Service 379 plays 54.6%
• Father John Misty 271 plays 54.6%
• Porcupine Tree 288 plays 54.5%
• Kishi Bashi 337 plays 52.2%
• Sarah McLachlan 308 plays 51.6%
• The Notwist 364 plays 48.9%
• Nick Cave & Warren Ellis 371 plays 48.5%
• Frou Frou 401 plays 47.6%
• Dire Straits 395 plays 47.1%
• Black Mountain 409 plays 46.9%
• Kanye West 502 plays 45.0%
• The War on Drugs 792 plays 33.3%
• Cat Power 1,314 plays 29.6%

• Top song
• Song two
• Songs three to five
• Everything else

Artists with at least 100 plays, 310 of them.

Records played as records

My top albums might have been more just playing the same two songs over and over. So for this analysis I wanted to estimate albums that I'd listened through all the way. In this calculation, plays are cut into sittings, and a sitting counts as an album listen only when it covers at least 60% of a real tracklist — distinct tracks, in something close to running order, with little else mixed in. That found 3,299 album listens across 773 records.

A year in months

This next set of analyses is more about my day-to-day listening habits. Some seasons demand different artists than other seasons. (Sweater weather in the fall, breezy poppier or folksy songs in the summer, Christmas music in December). In this visualization we can see the most common artists for every season. It's honestly less predictive than I would have expected - it tends to show more just getting into a band for a while, which can distort things a little...

Time of day

I was also curious when in the day I listened to the most music - which turned out to be much later than I would have expected... I'm not _that_ much of a night owl. Each wedge reaches out as far as that hour's share of all 135,147 scrobbles. The peak is 23:00, and 32.2% of everything lands between 9pm and 3am. This doesn't account much for anything recorded while traveling, which does add a baseline amount of noise.

Country of origin

Here, metadata about artists is read from MusicBrainz and I group where they're from. Hover a row for that country's most-played artists.

• United States 633 artists 66,910
• United Kingdom 198 artists 22,683
• Canada 61 artists 6,712
• Iceland 6 artists 2,656
• France 22 artists 2,123
• Sweden 19 artists 1,923
• Germany 24 artists 1,767
• Australia 25 artists 1,439
• Switzerland 3 artists 1,104
• Poland 5 artists 969
• Israel 2 artists 779
• Argentina 5 artists 702
• Finland 6 artists 665
• Japan 10 artists 663
• Belgium 6 artists 502

Covers 92.6% of plays by artists with at least 10 plays ( 1,303 artists); the rest MusicBrainz doesn't place anywhere.

Most popular decade

Each play placed on the decade its album first came out. The 2000s win with 30,751 plays. I would have expected a bigger 1970s bump. I suppose it's true that you tend to listen mostly to music from the time period you were in high school or college. Hover a bar for the decade's biggest album.

Dated from each album's first release on MusicBrainz. 77,221 plays carry a date; 20,489 are on albums without one, and 27,639 scrobbled with no album at all.

Favorite genres

Each artist is filed under their primary MusicBrainz genre, so each log counts a single time. Hover a row for who's inside it.

• indie rock 80 artists 13,872
• indie folk 25 artists 8,841
• alternative rock 64 artists 8,623
• rock 65 artists 7,772
• jazz 48 artists 5,540
• folk 38 artists 4,580
• indie pop 25 artists 4,479
• post-rock 14 artists 3,033
• folk rock 19 artists 2,750
• grunge 6 artists 2,555
• electronic 24 artists 2,507
• blues rock 27 artists 2,403
• progressive rock 22 artists 2,195
• psychedelic rock 19 artists 1,615
• dream pop 17 artists 1,597

Genres cover 86.4% of plays by the 1,303 artists with 10+ plays. Metadata from MusicBrainz.

Genre shifts over time

The same filing, split by year and drawn as proportions rather than totals — every bar is a full year, so what changes across the page is the mix and not the volume. The ten biggest genres of all time keep one colour throughout; everything else is grey, and hoverable.

• indie rock
• indie folk
• alternative rock
• rock
• jazz
• folk
• indie pop
• post-rock
• folk rock
• grunge
• Other genres
• No genre known
• Never looked up

The two lightest grey bands at the bottom each bar are what this does not know: artists MusicBrainz has no genre for, and artists below the 10-play floor that were never looked up. They are left in rather than divided out to show what it's harder to track or diversity of listening. 6 years are missing from the axis from when I didn't record.