I’ve been tracking all the music I listen to since mid-2011 on last.fm, and now it’s time to share my own version of Spotify Wrapped (but without the pretty graphics, and, more importantly, without the Spotify):
I listened to 41,110 total songs last year, which comes out to 112 a day!
Monthly averages ranged from a low of 100 (August) to a high of 129 (March). In 2023, my highest average (from December) had been 97, so that’s a pretty wild jump.
This is by far the most I’ve ever listened to music. My previous record was 28,616 songs in 2020, and I blew right past that this year—in large part because my job has allowed me to listen to music for hours and hours each night, which has been incredible. I’ve gotten to explore a lot more music than I otherwise would have!
My most-listened artists and albums are below.
Pretty crazy downy is #3 considering I discovered them on… December 1. I’ve barely stopped listening to them since.
This award goes to the album I listened to the most this year which I discovered at least a full calendar year prior.
Until I looked at the stats, I’d thought the Top Classic from both of the last two years was a shoo-in yet again. But to my surprise, it was narrowly beat out by 18 listens of…
This is a phenomenal album. Cloudkicker is the alias of commercial airline pilot Ben Sharp, who named each track after quotes from black box recordings of pilots in the midst of disaster (“It's Bad. We're Hit, Man, We Are Hit.”; “I Admit It Now. I Was Scared.”, “Amy, I Love You.”). The album is heavy, layered, and brooding, built upon massive riffs and impenetrable rhythms, to the point where I’ve sat down and argued with multiple friends about the time signatures on this thing. It vacillates between loud and quiet, and the drumming work is incredible—a stellar example of what midi drums are capable of. Sometimes this album is just the only thing that’ll scratch the itch of what I want to listen to, particularly when that itch is “dark, epic, and impossible to count”.
Shout-out to the runner-up, the Top Classic of both 2022 and 2023, Mujuice’s Cool Cool Death!, which I listened to 16 times!