A Year With Last FM

In a post a year ago I described a recently-published chart of ‘best ever’ albums that claimed to be the most accurate as it was based on historical sales.  I posited that a chart based on what people were actually listening to would be better, although this would be impossible to obtain. In that post, I hazarded a guess (by way of example) that the 10 albums I listened to the most were:

1. Radiohead OK Computer
2. Desaperacidos Read Music Speak Spanish
3. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
4. Jesus and Mary Chain Darklands
5. At The Drive In Relationship of Command
6. Pleasure Forever Alter
7. Oasis Definitely Maybe
8. Suede Dog Man Star
9. Nick Cave Let Love In
10. Bright Eyes Lifted or The Story Is In The Soil Keep Your Ear To The Ground

A geek-buddy (Neil) replied to my post saying that Last FM came pretty close to tracking actual listening habits (and not sales) so could provide a more realistic set of staistics.  So I signed up, and for the past year, everything I have listened to (save for a two or three month period when my PC was in transit between Belgium and the U.S.) has been ‘scrobbled’ to the Last FM servers, from where I can now see what I’ve been listening to it – just in case senile dementia has set in and I can’t remember!

It’s now been exactly one year since I signed up, and checking my charts in Last FM, I see that I have listened to some 23,895 tracks (running the full gamut from ‘Rock’ to ‘Alternative Rock’!), and the albums that I have listened to the most are:

1. The Twilight Singers Blackberry Belle (246 track-plays)
2. The Decemberists The Crane Wife (197 track-plays)
3. Broken Social Scene Broken Social Scene (161  track-plays)
4. The Twilight Singers Powder Burns (150  track-plays)
5. Radiohead OK Computer (142  track-plays)
6. Silversun Pickups Carnavas (138  track-plays)
7. The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (130 track-plays)
8. Bob Dylan Biograph (127 track-plays)
9. The Black Heart Procession The Spell (103  track-plays)
10. Kate Bush Aerial (100  track-plays)

So there we have it.  Definitve proof of what my favorite albums are – and proof that I really don’t know myself what I’m listening to (so maybe senile dementia has set in…).  But is this really that accurate?  Firstly, it is only what I’ve been listening to over the past 12 months, versus around 25 years of serious music consumption.  Because of this, my Last FM generated list is weighted towards albums I’ve bought recently (I tend to put new purchases on pretty heavy rotation at first) so the listen counts for these are probably artificially high.  For example, I’ve had Radiohead‘s OK Computer for ten years (I know, I can barely believe it myself…), vs. only one year for The Twighlight Singers‘ (very excellent) Blackberry Belle, so is it fair to rank them in the same way?  I should probably extrapolate OK Computer‘s listens to 1,420 (142 p.a. x 10 years), which would put it way in the lead.  Assuming I could remember when I bought every album (not always in the year of release) then this would be closer to a realistic chart.   But still not quite there.

Secondly, note that I’ve referred to the counts in the Last FM chart as ‘track-plays’.  Last FM simply counts the number of times a(ny) track on the album has been played.  If an album consists of five tracks and I listen to the entire album twice, then this will still get the same ‘play count’ as playing one ten-track album once.  That’s definitely not fair.  My #7 album according to Last FM is The Who‘s boxed set 25 Years of Maximum R’n’B, which happens to have 95 tracks.  Similarly, #8 is Dylan‘s Biograph boxed set with 53 tracks.  I have my iPod on random a lot, so the law of averages (or law of randomness – I was never that good at statistics) dictates that albums with higher track counts will rank higher in my listening habits, although I personally wouldn’t necessarily say I listen to these albums more often than other albums in my collection.  Also, if I played one track from a ten-track album ten times, then this would count as ten plays, as would playing all ten tracks from another ten-track album once each.  Is that a fair representation of which albums I listen to the most?

Maybe we could adjust the album charts to take into account the number of tracks on an album.  So my 130 plays of 25 Years of Maximum R’n’B at 95 tracks would equate to only 1.3 album listens, and OK Computer‘s 142 listens at 12 tracks would equate to 11 listens.

But even that isn’t really fair, as it doesn’t take into account actual listening time.  Albums with a few lengthy tracks such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s Lift Your Skinny Fists To Heaven – with an average track length of 21’45” minutes – would be penalised at the expense of the Pixies‘ Surfer Rosa which averages just under 2’20” a song.  If I listen to Brian Eno‘s 61-minute Thursday Afternoon, should this count for only the same amount of listening as listening to Napalm Death‘s 1.3-second meistewerk You Suffer, even though I would have spent approximatey 2,815 times longer listening to Brian Eno than Napalm Death?

Reassuringly (or worryingly…) it’s not just me who is worried about this.  Some enterprising Last FM user went away and wrote a ‘Normalizer’ that would recalculate your Last FM statistics, based on the track length.  This gives me a ‘normalized’ Top 10 albums of:

1. The Twilight Singers Blackberry Belle (996 minutes)
2. Broken Social Scene Broken Social Scene (730 minutes)
3. Radiohead OK Computer (632 minutes)
4. Sonic Youth Murray Street (488 minutes)
5. Massive Attack Mezzanine (434 minutes)
6. Bright Eyes Lifted or The Story Is In The Soil Keep Your Ear To The Ground (411 minutes)
7. Afghan Whigs Gentlemen (408 minutes)
8. TV on the Radio Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (391 minutes)
9. 65daysofstatic The Fall Of Math (388 minutes)
10. Suede Dog Man Star (380 minutes)

This is now getting a bit closer to reality, in that three of what I originally thought were my favorite albums are in this list.  But it’s still not really 100%.  This could be because the Normalizer takes average track lengths for an artist, rather than using the length of each individual track.  True, it is closer than assuming that every track by every artist is the same length (as Last FM does) but it isn’t really a true definition of ‘listening time’.  Unfortunately, such statistics are pretty much impossible to gather (until we all have scrobblers embedded in our ears — go on Neil, tell me that you know where to get one of these…).

So where does this leave us?  Umm, not sure.  In fact, what’s the point of it all?  Not sure about that either.  But if nothing else, it does make an interesting diversion for we anally-retentive iPod owners who take our music (far too) seriously.

Oh, and Neil: The Beatles are no longer #1 at Last FM.  That honor now goes to Radiohead (with 96,694 listeners and 1,250,542 plays, to The Beatles’ 78,024 listeners and 902,578 plays).  Strangely, Radiohead are the only band who appear in all of my charts above.  No matter which way you slice it, Radiohead are officially Bigger Than The Beatles…